Untouchable
by Nadin4400
Summary: Owen Grady knows everything about the war. His own child? Not so much. A fresh-out-of-the-NAVY widower, he settles in his home town with his 5-year-old daughter in hopes of piecing their shattered lives back together. And then they meet Claire Dearing... AU. Clawen.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's note:** Well, let's give this a try, shall we? I wrote this story over 5 months ago but didn't have the guts to post it sooner. Still don't. But I don't want it to just die on my laptop either, so... It's my second kid fic ever and it's MILES outside of my comfort zone, but I adore it and I hope you'll like it, too :) (If you don't, please be kind anyway)

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 _"And I'd choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I'd find you and I'd choose you."  
\- the chaos of stars _

_There was a moment in everyone's life destined to change them forever._

 _A milestone. A realization. A heartbreak._

 _A point of no return._

 _One second, and poof! They could never look at the world around them the same way as before. A collision so monumental that it shifted the axis of the Earth and made the rivers run backwards._

 _For Owen Grady, that moment was when a nurse put his newborn daughter in his arms, a tiny bundle, so light it was practically weightless in his palms. For a second, he was scared to breathe for fear of breaking her, or having her slip through his fingers. The most perfect little girl. And there it was, a seismic shift inside him, a hurricane of love so powerful it all but swept him off his feet, his chest tight and the words he didn't know ow to say lodged in his throat._

 _And while his wife slept, exhausted, he sat in a chair beside her, counting their little girl's toes and fingers, watching her tiny eyebrows knit together in her sleep, and knowing that there was nothing in the world he wouldn't do for her. Nothing he wouldn't do to make her happy._

xoox

Of course, he knew her.

Well, he knew _of_ her. Everyone around here course, he knew her.

A small-town ice-skating prodigy discovered almost by accident, Claire Dearing had won every junior-level competition there was and moved on to the senior ones while her peers were still finessing their spins and jumps, not even dreaming about the 'big league' yet. Owen could still remember the time when no sports segment went without her flashing her awards and medals at the camera, along with that big, bright smile that made the hearts of the audience all over the world melt.

Native of Madison, Wisconsin, she was training for the Olympics, and everyone knew she was going to win. Rigorous and determined, she was meant for the great things, greater than anyone could even imagine.

Until an unfortunate fall during a practice and a knee trauma that left her on crutches for a year effectively put her dreams of a professional athletic career to rest.

Everyone said she was lucky that she didn't end up limp, that the physical therapy fixed what the surgeries couldn't. She could still walk, they would note. To Owen, it always sounded like cutting off a bird's wings and expecting it to be grateful it could still see the sky, far-away and entirely unattainable now. Didn't they understand it, he used to wonder. So what if the bird could witness the most mesmerizing sunsets if it couldn't soar above the clouds ever again?

Several years her senior, he'd left for college around the time the accident happened, the news exploding out of nowhere and stirring their sleepy community that preyed on gossip and half-truths, eager to sink their teeth into something as sensational as their home-grown hero's drama unfolding before their eyes. However, by the time he finished his first semester at the University of Michigan, Owen forgot about Claire Dearing altogether like she'd never even existed. And so did the rest of the world, it seemed. College, the NAVY, a family of his own – all this blurred his memories of the brightest star his home town had ever been known for, until only a few scraps of them were left, scattered and faded in the corners of his mind.

Watching her now from the bleachers wrapped around a small Community Center ice-rink, he couldn't believe his eyes. Couldn't believe she was even real. Spinning to the sounds of _Wonderful Tonight,_ spilling from the speakers hanging high up under the ceiling, she wasn't even gliding along the smooth, pale-blue surface scarred with the cuts left by her ice-skates. She was flying, floating, transcending the boundaries of space and time. Graceful and lean, she pushed forward, one movement pouring into another. He had never seen anyone seem so absolutely in control of their body, so at peace with themselves.

The song changed to a classical piece, and so did her rhythm. Slightly escalated tempo, more intricate jumps and transitions.

Her eyes were half-closed most of the time, a few stray wisps of bright-red hair that escaped from the ponytail at the nape of her neck brushed against her cheeks, a small smile playing on her lips. Even from his position a good hundred feet away, he could tell that she wasn't _hearing_ the music – she was _feeling_ it in her blood and bones. The music was the force that kept her moving, tugging and pulling at her body, molding it into the notes that were filling up the air.

Never once did Owen wish to give the wings to a bird so bad.

He must have moved or maybe cleared his throat – he wasn't sure, too transfixed by the scene in front of him – but she noticed him, spotting him out of the corner of her eye. She finished her spin, but instead of continuing with her dance, she started toward him, adjusting the thin black gloves on her hands.

Owen stood up. "You sure do that a lot," he noted when she was close enough to hear him over the music, making his way down a few steps and toward the barrier around the ice.

"Pardon me?"

Not even winded by what he could only refer to as 'breaking the limitations of physics and human nature', Claire tilted her head slightly and pushed her hair back from of her forehead, regarding him inquisitively.

"I see you here a lot," he said. "Doing… um, that." That did not sound good. "I mean, not that I watch." Okay, that was even worse. He squeezed his eyes for a moment, hoping that the past thirty seconds would disappear like they never happened, and then pointed at the small round windows in the double doors behind his back. "I run the VA meetings upstairs," he started again, taking a breath. "And I… um, see you on my way out sometimes."

Claire's face lit up. "Oh, you must be Owen Grady! It's nice to finally meet you." She was actually smiling now, no longer bearing a layer of precaution around the stranger he'd noticed when she first approached him. "I saw the poster," she added in response to his quizzical look. "About the VA meetings. Your name is on it. And we don't have many new faces around here."

"Right," he shuffled his feel, wincing inwardly.

The poster wasn't his idea, but his manager, a stocky 'Nam veteran named Mark, thought that they needed proper advertisement, and Owen's name made it somehow more official. There was no logic behind it whatsoever, but it felt odd to mention it to someone he'd just met, so he didn't.

"Claire." She offered him her gloved hand and he shook it firmly.

"Dearing, right?" It came out almost against his will, but he couldn't help himself – it was just too much of a coincidence not to make sure he was right in his assumption. It had been a long time, after all. She nodded, not at all surprised, either used to being a celebrity of sorts, or simply assuming he'd read her name on the bulletin board in the hallway as well. Not that it mattered.

"I've always been curious about what you guys were doing up there but never had a chance to ask," she admitted.

He hummed. "Until now?"

Claire shrugged, unable to hold back a smirk. "Well, you're _right_ here."

Owen let out a short laugh and ran his hand through his hair. "It's kind of like an AA type of thing, I guess. Except we try to help people talk through how much their civilian life sucks." Her eyebrows arched in surprise and he added, "No kidding. When you're used to falling asleep on the ground to the sound of exploding missiles, a warm, soft bed and, I don't know, hot food could be disconcerting."

"Sounds complicated," she said without a hint of irony.

He nodded. "It is, sometimes."

She nodded, too. Cleared her throat, her gaze growing pensive. "Well, since, I'm assuming, you're not here to rope me into joining your team, what can I help you with, Mr. Grady?"

Owen stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket. She must've been warm from her practice, wearing only a light sweater, but this auditorium was at least ten degrees colder than the rest of the building, their breaths puffing out in small white clouds, and he was grateful for an extra layer of clothing.

"Owen," he offered. "Ah, well… my daughter – she's five and she's all about ponies and being an ice princess these days. And since a pony is off the table, I thought that maybe…" He trailed off.

Claire's smile brightened, her face lighting up.

"You should bring her over," she said, hands clasped on the barrier between them for support. She glanced around the mostly dark space, the ice-rink being the main spot bathed in the soft light while the rest of the room was all shadows and vague forms of chairs and equipment, and turned back to him. "I'm fresh out of printed schedules, I'm afraid. Sorry. But there's one pinned to the information board in the hallway."

"Okay, sure."

"There's a class at 6 on Friday." She chewed thoughtfully on her lip for a few moments, considering something or another. "But why don't you guys come over at 5.30 so we could chat for a bit and get to know each other? How about that?"

Another nod. He was starting to feel like a dashboard toy. "Great. We'll do that."

The lights around them changed from blue to pale yellow when _Your Song_ began to play, Elton John's voice filling every corner and nook of the space around them, resonating against the concrete walls. Owen glanced up, then at Claire again. She was watching him curiously, her features soft in the dim light, but unmistakable now – a face he'd seen before. Sharper, more guarded in the way that came with the age and experience, but familiar nonetheless.

It was an odd feeling, like a blast from the past. Everything around here felt like walking down a memory lane, and more often than not, he couldn't help but feel like he was sucked back into the time when he was 20 and the world, however chaotic, made much more sense. It was almost ironic how little this town had changed in the past decade and a half, although Owen could also argue and say that maybe it was he who had changed too much for this place to keep up with him. Hell, even its homegrown hero was standing right in front him, making him question his sanity, and this was perhaps the one thing he'd never expected from moving back to Madison.

Life was a funny thing indeed.

"You're… good at this," he jerked his chin toward the ice, not sure what else to say but desperate to fill the pause before it got awkward, physically feeling the rusty creak of his socializing skills he'd kept under a padlock for way too long now.

Claire brushed a piece of hair from her cheek. "You'd be surprised what a little bit of practice could accomplish."

The 'a little bit' part made Owen chuckle, and then wonder if she were being modest, or if she truly believed that the kind of grace he witnessed not ten minutes ago was hidden in everyone, waiting to be unleashed onto the world. Her face was open and friendly, but too unreadable for him to make a safe bet. For a moment, he even thought she was messing with him, but for all he knew, she had no idea he was actually aware of who she really was. Besides, she didn't seem like the type. At first glance, at least.

"Well, thank you, Ms. Dearing," he said at last.

"Claire," she insisted. "And I hope to see you and…?"

"Harper," Owen added quickly.

"You and Harper on Friday."

With that, she pushed away from the barrier, waving her goodbye to him, and it took Owen another hour to shake off the feeling that he suddenly fell into a parallel dimension or something, the image of Claire Dearing conquer the ice seared into his memory.

xoox

Harper Grady was the most serious five-year old Claire had ever met.

In the ten minutes that they knew each other, she'd been well-mannered and perfectly polite. She also didn't smile once. Not unfriendly, Claire decided, just un-child-like cautious. Like she didn't know what to expect from the world around her, and for a good reason too, perhaps.

Right now, Harper was studying her with her chocolate eyes as if trying to take Claire apart and put her back together in her head while her skates-clad feet dangled under the hard plastic chair. She looked like her father in a way – her nose and the curve of her lips were his for sure, and so were the barely noticeable indentations on her cheeks that undoubtedly dipped into dimples when she smiled, but her hair tied into a tight ponytail was darker than Owen's, thick and heavy, and curling at the ends.

She was certainly the kind of kid who, once told not to trust strangers, would not only run with it, but take it to a whole new level, or so it seemed. And even though it could look adorable on the surface, it also made her appear older than she was, as if she'd woken up one day and decided to skip her childhood altogether. Practical and rational were the first words that came to Claire's mind when Owen introduced his daughter to her. However, she couldn't help but wonder what she'd find beneath fifteen layers of armor if she got a chance.

"Do I have to, daddy?" Harper asked without turning to Owen who was sitting one row behind her, and he gave Claire a helpless look over his daughter's head.

Claire crouched down in front of the girl and smiled. "Of course, not, honey," she promised, her gaze flickered briefly to Owen in what she hoped was encouragement. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do." She paused. "But how about we make a deal? We try this for just a while and if you don't like it, you can go home any time. How does that sound?"

Harper peered at Claire for a long moment, her lips puckered apprehensively. She glanced quickly over her shoulder at Owen who added wattage to his smile when she turned, and then she finally nodded slowly, still seemingly uncertain of whether or not this was a good idea.

And maybe it was only Claire's imagination, but she could have sworn Owen sighed with relief.

She offered Harper her hand and the girl accepted it, if a little gingerly, allowing Claire to help her walk to the gate leading to the arena, teetering in her skates, her eyes darting around curiously, taking note of the lights gliding along the ice and the empty seats around them.

"Have you done this before?" Owen heard Claire ask his daughter, and Harper nodded. "Did you like it?"

"Yes," the girl responded, stepping cautiously into the rink, her gloved hand reaching instinctively for the barrier for support, but Claire's firm grip kept her steady on her feet.

"I like your skates," she noted with approval.

They were purple, with white and blue snowflakes – Harper's most prized possession. "My mom picked them," she said quietly.

"Well, she has a very good taste."

Owen didn't hear anything after that, their voices swallowed by the sounds of the music, filling the large auditorium and echoing in the corners and under the high ceiling. He leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees and his chin resting on the knot of his fingers as he watched the two of them grow smaller as they moved toward the center of the arena.

Surprisingly, getting Harper to come here turned out being a much more challenging task than he anticipated – apparently, the idea of being an ice princess worked just fine for her in theory, so long as she didn't have to leave the house. His offer that he hoped would elicit some enthusiasm was met instead with a firm no and an averted gaze. He had to use the exact same technique Claire used just now – a promise to leave the moment Harper decided she'd had enough.

However, it wasn't until Claire commented on his daughter's skates that it dawned on him that it most definitely was about Jenny, not Harper's sudden change of heart, and now he felt like a complete moron, and a jerk on top of that, his chest tight and hollow.

 _Everything_ in their lives was about Jenny and her habits and small rituals neither of them dared to break for fear of having the world fall apart around them. They were buying his late wife's preferred brand of milk, and watching her TV shows that their TV kept recording every Tuesday and Friday, and doing laundry on Wednesdays and Saturdays the way Jenny used to. He was still picking up the Jaffa Cakes at the grocery store even though neither he, not Harper ate them, all because they were his wife's favourite snack, often not realizing he was doing it until it was time to unpack the grocery bags. The Jaffa Cakes would jump out of them, taunting him with the memories of chocolate-stained kisses and crumbs in bed that Owen used to complain about but that he'd give his right arm to have back in his life again.

Harper wasn't taking it much better, transforming before his eyes from a girl who would never stop laughing into a ghost of herself, distant and withdrawn. And even though she never told him that – he wondered sometimes if she'd know how to do it – but he knew that she was holding onto the memories of Jenny as fiercely as Owen, scared to let go.

All things considered, there was a chance that by trying to fix something very fragile now, he just wrecked it completely.

"So, what's the verdict?" Owen asked, approaching the arena a little over an hour later when the class was over and the group dispersed – some kids hurrying over to their parents while a few others chose to hang back, too engrossed in the process, with Harper among them.

"She's a delight," Claire assured him, sliding effortlessly toward him. She pulled the hair-tie off the bun her hair was gathered into and ruffled it absently with her fingers, allowing it to fall in cascading waves over her shoulders.

"No, I mean…" He faltered, struggling to find the right words, his gaze flickered over the woman's shoulder toward his kid who was awkwardly trying to practice a one-leg spin with another couple of tiny students. "Is she a right fit, or whatever it's called?"

"Well, all this is mostly for fun. I'm not training the world champions here," Claire responded with a soft smile. "If she likes it, she's a right fit." He squirmed a bit, his eyes still on his daughter. "What?"

Owen let out a long sigh, his eyebrows pulled together. "Nothing. It's just… Jenny, my wife, started teaching Harper the basics of this stuff a couple of years ago," he explained. "She's never done it professionally or anything, but you know how the winters can be in this area."

"Long," Claire suggested.

"Yeah." He muttered and rolled his shoulders, not quite sure why they were even having this conversation. Claire Dearing was a stranger, someone he didn't know. A faint memory from the times when he was annoyed at his mother for watching those figure-skating competitions because they got in his way of enjoying the reruns of _Twin Peaks_. He scrubbed a hand down his face. "It used to be their thing. I should've thought about it before bringing Harper here."

" _Used_ to be?" Claire echoed.

"My wife passed away seven months ago. Lymphoma."

Claire's face fell. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"It's okay," Owen started, but then cut off and shook his head, offering her a crooked, humorless smile. "Don't you just hate this part? You know, when someone says they're sorry about something terrible and you feel compelled to say it's okay even though it's anything but and your life is actually a disaster?" He grimaced, surprised by where this came from. "Sorry, that was a very unnecessary oversharing."

She studied him for a long moment. "Look, Mr. Grady… Owen, it's like I said – Harper is wonderful and I'd be happy to have her here, but given the delicate nature of this situation, I think she should be the one to choose whether or not she wants—Ow!"

At that moment, Harper barreled into Claire from behind, choosing her as a cushion to shop her fall, her arms wrapping automatically around the woman's legs.

"Hey there," Claire peered down at the girl, her eyebrows arched, her hand reaching for Harper's shoulder, and Harper grinned back.

"Hey, champ." Owen peeked around Claire and down at his daughter. "How about we don't injure anyone today?" With that, he picked her up and swung her easily over the barrier before depositing her in the nearest chair to help her change into her boots. "Did you have fun?" He asked, kneeling before her to unlace her skates.

"Claire's hair looks like Ariel's," Harper told him in a loud whisper, and they both turned to Claire who was still lingering a few feet away from them, amused by the comment.

"I've heard worse." She winked at the girl, and then someone called out her name, and after a quick apology, she moved over to the older boy of about 7 and his parents, pulling her hair back into a messy bun as she did so.

"Yeah, it does," Owen agreed absently.

He helped Harper collect her things and put on her coat before slinging her shiny backpack and a tote bag with her skates over his shoulder. Then he scooped his daughter up and hoisted her on his hip, not oblivious to the fact that his kid seemed happy for the first time in weeks.

"So, what'd you say?" He asked, not without hesitation. "Wanna come back?"

Harper clutched his jacket with her hands. "Tomorrow."

Owen adjusted his grip on her, chuckling. "No can do, buddy. Tomorrow's Saturday, they're closed. How about next week?"

She nodded eagerly and waved her goodbye to Claire who waved back before resuming her conversation with someone's mom, her hands moving animatedly as she spoke, and Owen paused briefly in the doorway, unsure of what he was looking for.

He had never seen anyone look so alive and vibrant before, her life force boiling over the edge with every breath she took. This was the person who made his daughter _smile_ for the first time in what felt like forever, and he was torn – both happy beyond himself, and also not quite trusting any of this to be permanent. After all, in his experience, nothing good ever lasted for long.

xoox

Claire dropped her gym bag in the hallway and kicked off her heavy boots, marveling in the warmth of her house. January was being particularly ferocious this year, and even a brief walk from her car to the front door threatened to leave her cheeks and fingers frostbitten.

She pulled her scrunchie off her hair again, her scalp aching from the tight hairdos, and padded into the kitchen, turning on the kettle and reaching for her phone tucked in the back pocket of her jeans at the same time.

There were three new voicemail messages: from her older sister, Karen, who reminded Claire about a family dinner this Sunday, telling her to please not be late; from her daytime job manager asking her to go through the client files first thing on Monday so they could be approved before lunch; and from Jason.

Claire listened to the first two and deleted the third one without checking it. Lately, it was starting to feel like they'd talked more after the breakup than in the months leading to it, and it was beginning to get on her nerves. They'd never been good for one another, and try as she might, she couldn't understand why Jason was trying so hard to hold on to the pieces of their relationship now if he didn't bother making an effort while they were still together.

Her knee throbbed dully, probably warning her about another storm coming their way. Claire made a mental note to give it some extra care tonight – maybe a long, hot bath. That seldom was a bad idea. It was a relief, she had to admit, not to be constantly aware of it anymore, not to have to calculate her every move the way she used to. But it had been so long since she didn't have to think about it at all that she sometimes couldn't even remember what it was like. A crushed kneecap that signified her crushed dreams – there was an almost poetical irony to it.

The kettle turned off and she pulled a bag of loose-leaf tea from the cupboard, her mind drifting off to the next week's To Do list, and then, surprisingly, to what Owen Grady had told her about his family. The story sounded vaguely familiar. In the city like Madison it probably made the news – everything always made the news here, the local events so sparse and random just about anyone's sneeze was deemed sensational.

Seven months ago, he said. There was something about an ex-marine losing his wife to a cancer a while back, which briefly sparked the need-for-a-better-cancer-research talk in the local media, but Claire wasn't certain it was the same case. She didn't know if he was an ex-marine, for starters. Knew he came from the military, what with his involvement with the VA, but it didn't mean anything. They might have just moved here a few weeks ago, as far as she was aware.

The one thing she did know was that she was glad she didn't ask about Mrs. Grady, despite being mildly curious. God, the lazy life in this town was getting the best of her.

Harper was an interesting little thing, smart beyond her age and very dedicated, from what Claire saw today. Careful with who she was willing to open up to as well, which hardy seemed like a bad thing, but still a rather uncommon one in a child. She was tempted to google them, but it felt unethical and wrong, like sneaking into their house when no one was home and going through their personal things. Besides, it was none of her business.

Her phone started to ring when she almost convinced herself that having one peek wasn't a crime, effectively distracting her from the thoughts about her students and their parents.

"Hey, Karen…. Yes, I got your message." She picked up her tea and headed for the living room. "Yes, I'll be on time… And yes, I'll bring the dessert."

xoox

Owen's hair was still damp from the post-gym shower when he hopped down the stairs to the first floor of the Community Center, oddly upbeat, still riding on the workout endorphins, the last song that played on his phone stuck in his head. He patted his pockets, looking for the car keys, humming that R'n'B something under his breath, his muscles aching after two hours of cardio that managed to put his mind off the impending gloom that his life had become so long ago he could barely remember it being anything else – a much needed break.

He didn't miss the NAVY, per se. Not the war part of it, at least. Not being away from his family for months at a time and grainy images of their faces on his laptop during their infrequent calls, or knowing that his daughter had to basically reacquaint herself with him every time he returned from another tour. Certainly not never knowing if he was going to see the light of a new day again. What he did miss was having some sort of an order to his life, a routine, something that was _there_ without his having to make an effort.

Right now, it was the opposite of that, and somehow, it seemed more terrifying than running through a rain of bullets. At least then, he knew the possible outcome.

The building was half-empty, his footsteps echoing loudly in the wide corridor. Someone was playing racquetball in one of the gymnasiums, making the walls of the whole structure vibrate with every strike. His gaze slipped habitually past the skating rink doors and he paused almost against himself.

She was there.

Again.

Of course, she was there. He doubted the woman ever left this place at all.

Owen stepped closer, his legs moving on the will of their own as if they were not in sync with his brain anymore. Dressed in tight black leggings and a loose sweater, Claire Dearing was soaring over the ice like she was a feather chased around by the wind. From his spot, he could now also hear Billy Joel spill his soul out of the loudspeakers, slightly muffled by the doors between them.

Claire did a Lutz and set into a spin, so fast it made Owen dizzy. The words, seemingly long forgotten, started to pop up in his mind, the names of the moves and techniques. Jenny and her love for this stuff… She used to comment on the routines of the athletes if he happened to be in the room when she watched live streams of the championships on the TV, and Owen didn't even know he was really listening.

He wondered what Jenny would say about Claire Dearing.

He'd never seen anyone be in their element like that before. It was like she was more comfortable on the ice than anyone he knew had ever been walking on solid ground. Her bright red hair was nothing but a blur as she finished her twirl and then pushed back as though the air around her was a solid, tangible wall, sailing toward the far end of the arena, slipping in and out of the beams of light like she was flickering – on and off and on again - practically incorporeal. If he didn't know for a fact that at some point in her life she was _this_ close to never doing any of this ever again, he would never have guessed.

This time, when Owen opened the door, she noticed him right away.

"Are you making a habit out of this, Mr. Grady?" Claire asked jokingly as she made her way to him, slightly out of breath, curling wisps of hair framing her flushed cheeks.

He dropped his bag into one of the chairs. "They've got a good gym here," he said, inexplicably feeling that it was important that he had a reason to be here.

"They do," she agreed, watching him expectantly.

"Look," he started after a moment of odd silence, towering over her even with the benefit of her footwear. "I wanted to apologize. I shouldn't have dumped that personal stuff on you yesterday. It was… uncalled for. And, let's face it, plain inappropriate."

"Don't," Claire shook her head and looped her hair around her ear, and it instantly fell on her cheek again. "It's okay, really," she promised. Her gaze darted over her shoulder and then returned to Owen, an eyebrow quirked. "You want to give this a try?"

"Oh, hell no!" He raised his hands, and even stepped back for good measure. "This morning at the supermarket, I called an elderly lady 'sir'. Not sure I can afford to land of my ass in front of anyone anytime soon."

"Suit yourself."

Claire turned around, clutched the edge of the barrier and pulled herself up and onto it, her feet dangling in the air, the heels of her skates bumping against the wood planks now and then. When she moved, Owen caught a whiff of vanilla and something citrus coming off of her, like a grapefruit, perhaps. His throat closed up for a second in a long-forgotten, scary way, and he stepped away from her surreptitiously, hoping she wouldn't notice.

If she did, she didn't show it.

"Did Harper like it here?" Claire asked after a moment or two, absently humming along with the tune he couldn't quite place.

Owen snorted. "Let me see – I've heard your name about three thousand times since the last night. So I guess it's safe to say the answer is yes."

It was rather phenomenal, to put it mildly. He'd spent the past several months dragging her around to the zoos and tap dance classes, play dates and arts and crafts sessions, but neither of them sparked her interest the way this place did. And after he honestly thought he'd messed it up, too.

Go figure.

Claire laughed. "Well, that's good news, I think?" She glanced down at him. "She's a good kid."

He rubbed his face and leaned against the barrier next to her, watching the blue and golden lights slide over the smooth surface, stretching in front of them. "I have two jobs and she's got a babysitter," he said quietly. "I hoped that maybe a familiar hobby would bring some structure to our lives."

Hands clasped together, he stifled a sigh. It was a strange feeling to be saying this out loud, especially to someone who wasn't a family, and knowing his mother's fretfulness, he'd long stopped mentioning his inner struggles to her, well aware that there was nothing she could do but get upset anyway. Maybe there was, after all, something to that theory about how random strangers made the best listeners because they didn't really care.

Maybe he needed a shrink.

"Yesterday you said you're not training the world champions here, but you could, couldn't you?" He asked on impulse, unable to bite it back. "I mean, if those kids could do half of the stuff you can, they'd be collecting medals by a bunch."

Claire's hands clasped the barrier on either side of her hips as she continued to stare straight ahead. "Not everything is about winning."

Owen glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. "Okay, so what was it about for you, then?"

Her teeth dug into her bottom lip. "You know," she breathed out.

It was a statement, not a question.

He shifted from foot to foot. "Not at first. And it's not why I brought my kid here. But I kinda grew up in the area," he confessed with a guilty grimace. "Went to college out of state 'round the same time you stopped… performing."

"That's one way to put it," she murmured.

"You were quite a legend."

"The truth about legends, Mr. Grady?" Claire looked down at him. "Usually, people see only what they want to see in them."

She'd become old news a long time ago, her trophies and awards collecting dust in the attic for over a decade now. The surgery that ended with a couple of complications, the physical therapy, having to learn to walk again, then to skate like she'd never stood on the ice before – by the time Claire emerged on the other side of this nightmare, it felt like she herself might have as well been covered in cobwebs. Half the time, she found it hard to believe that that other shiny life happened at all – sometimes, not even a few boxfuls of stuff could do the trick.

Few people understood that it had never been about winning for her so much as about being happy. So happy her heart was soaring into the sky with every stroke of the blades against the hard, cold surface. If Claire could do it again, even knowing beforehand how it would eventually end, she'd do it in a heartbeat.

The last time anyone recognized her from those days long gone had been a few years ago, and by accident, too. A woman her mother's age at the farmer's market told Claire that she looked just like 'that girl, so tragic'.

She didn't mind; that other life wasn't her anymore, hadn't been for quite a while now, but talking to Owen Grady stirred something inside her. A longing never fulfilled. She didn't even know him, but his presence unearthed everything she had long taught herself not to think about, catching her unawares and throwing her right back into the whirlpool it took her ages to find her way out of.

Truth be told, Claire wasn't sure how she felt about it.

He straightened up and squinted at her. "This Mr. Grady business is freaking me out. I can't tell if you're serious or not."

"Maybe a little bit of both," she admitted, sliding back onto the ice again and blowing a strand of hair from her forehead with a huff.

"Right," Owen nodded and cleared his throat. "Well, I'm… I gotta run. It's a pasta night. A hundredth one in a row, it seems."

Despite a wave of inner turmoil that washed over her during their brief conversation, Claire felt her lips tug up at the corners. "Looks like you guys already have all the structure you need," she noted.

He snorted, making a funny face. "Yeah, um… baby steps. See ya around?"

"Have a good weekend… Owen."

xoox

Red light switched to green, and Owen turned onto Main Street, his hand resting lightly on the steering wheel. His body hummed in that way that made him want to crawl into bed and sleep for a hundred years – ha! – and his mind was oddly empty.

When he entered the house 10 minutes later, it smelled of cinnamon and sugar. Sure enough, Mrs. Carmichael, his sixty-something next door neighbour who watched Harper when she wasn't at school or he needed to run an errand without a child in tow, had made cookies. It wasn't the worst thing to come home to, he decided in the end.

They were drawing at the dining room table, his daughter's face basically pressed to the white sheet of paper, her eyebrows knitted together in concentration.

At the times like this, she looked so much like Jenny it hurt.

Mrs. Carmichael noticed him and rose to leave, assuring him that everything was perfectly fine here. He thanked her profusely, as he did every time he was seeing her out, never quite able to find the words to express how much she was saving his life by not saying no when he needed her help.

"So, whatcha working on?" Owen asked Harper when he returned to the dining room and plopped into the chair next to hers, taking a cookie from a plate in front of the girl.

"Claire," she muttered without looking at him.

He could see that now – the skating rink was unmistakable, and so was Claire's wild red mane that sort of looked more like a cape in his daughter's picture. He chose not to mention it. Otherwise, it was surprisingly accurate.

"You hungry? Want me to whip something up?" Owen asked instead, changing the subject and hoping he sounded enthusiastic enough to get her excited about something as mundane as dinner.

Yes, Jenny would never have asked – she'd go to the kitchen, make a proper meal consisting of all the right food groups and proper nutrients, and have Harper eat it. But he couldn't do that. Situations like this still made him feel like an outsider, like he needed a permission to take care of his daughter, let alone boss her around, and a part of him feared he was doing more damage with this gentle approach than he would have with a firm one.

It had been seven months, and Harper was still alive – he must have been doing _something_ right. It was a small consolation, though, and on most days, he knew that she knew it, too.

Harper nodded. "Mac 'n' cheese."

"Harper…"

"Mac 'n' cheese," she repeated, reaching for the blue pencil.

One day, he hoped, she would get sick of all things pasta. There was nothing Owen looked forward to more than that. A couple of times he was tempted to tell her the world had run out of it, but he doubted she was that stupid while a part of him also feared she'd refuse to eat at all. So Mac 'n' cheese it was, every goddamn night.

A few hours later, Owen poked his head into his her room to find her in bed with Dr. Seuss's _The Lorax_ spread open in her lap. His heart constricted momentarily.

This was the first book she and Jenny read together when Harper was learning her letters. She'd probably read it over a hundred times in the past few months. The pages were starting to wear thin at the edges, the cover getting cracked and loose from being constantly carried in her backpack. Like a safety blanket, the therapist explained to Owen when he'd first brought her in for a consult after she hadn't spoken a single word in the week following the funeral. She needed something familiar to help her cope with the loss, and the book was as a good an option as anything else.

A part of Owen wished she'd move on to something else already, something less painful for her. God only knew what she was feeling as her finger traced the familiar words on the page, her lips moving without a sound. And another part of him envied her just a little – he had memories, of course, and he was still wearing his wedding ring, but he never had anything of that kind he shared with Jenny. Nothing, except his daughter, that he could hold on to in order to feel her presence.

"Lights out, kiddo," Owen said, stepping inside.

Harper looked up at him and put the book onto the crowded beside table, nearly knocking a few items to the floor. She wiggled down in her bed until her head was resting on the pillow and pulled her blanket up to her chin.

"Want me to leave the night light on?" He asked.

She nodded, and then called out for him when he reached for the switch. "Daddy?" Owen turned to her. "Is it Monday tomorrow yet?"

He hesitated for a moment, his hand hovering near the wall, and then walked over and sat down onto the edge of her bed, watching her closely. "No. Monday is when the school is, honey. Since when are you looking forward to _that_?"

For a moment, her eyes darted toward her ice-skates, hanging by the shoelaces on the doorknob, and then she looked away and started tracing the stitches on her blanket with her finger, following the lines of an embroidered royal lily. "No reason," she said softly.

Owen glanced over his shoulder. "You liked it there, didn't you?"

Harper offered him a half shrug, still not raising her eyes. "You think she's mad at me?" She asked under her breath just as he'd decided this conversation was over.

"Who?"

"Mommy. Is she mad that I do the stuff she liked to do without her?"

She might have as well sucker-punched him.

Even after she finally started talking again, Harper barely ever spoke about Jenny, ignoring Owen's attempts to bring her up most of the time, and he never pressed for more, choosing to believe she was processing what happened in her own way, which only made these random mentions so much more bizarre and painful.

"No," he croaked after a few seconds, struggling to find his voice again. "Of course, no, baby. Your mom… she loved you more than anything in this world. The only thing she'd ever wanted was for you is be happy, no matter what. She could never, ever be mad at you for anything, especially for enjoying something you love." His gaze dropped to her small hand resting on the covers. "You know she's not coming back, right?" Harper nodded. "Well, you know… I'm sure it would mean a lot to her if you liked something she was fond of."

"Really?" She lifted her face, her expression still somewhat conflicted.

"Really," Owen smiled.

"Cross your heart?"

"Cross my heart."

With that, he kissed her on the forehead and turned the overhead light off, wishing her good night. He decided to leave the door a crack open on his way out. Just in case.

 **To be continued...**

* * *

A/N: Well, I hope you're having fun so far! Please let me know what you think, guys :)


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's note** : Thanks for all the love, guys! This story is a lot of fun to work on and I'm glad for your wonderful comments. Well, dig in!

* * *

"Okay, man, what's with the face?" Barry asked Owen a week later, giving him a curious look from under the car next to the one Owen was working on.

A dark-skinned man with smiling eyes, he served in the Air Force in Quebec several years ago. As fate would have it, he met a girl from the Midwest and moved to Wisconsin when his army contract came to an end. The relationship died eventually, but by then, Barry had managed to grow roots here, saying that the winters were just as bad in Madison as they were in Montreal, and the rest didn't really matter. He wasn't planning on going back to the Air Force, having had enough of that life, and this place was as good as any.

Sometime later, he opened an auto repair shop, choosing to be his own boss, but even though he had guys like Owen to take care of everything, he never shied away from getting his hands dirty because it made him feel useful. Besides, being stuck in the office all day, dealing with the paper work was driving him insane.

Before long, he and Owen bonded over their military past, their love for gingerbread cookies, and classic rock. It was an effortless friendship that involved grabbing a beer or two after work, running together now and then, or watching ball games while talking about nothing in particular. Harper adored him, fascinated by his accent, an endless array of jokes he had in store, and, if Owen was completely honest with himself, the way their small world wasn't a shrine of grief when Barry was around, probably because he didn't tiptoe around them like they were breakable.

"What's wrong with it?" Owen reached automatically for his cheek. "Is there something on it?" They were permanently covered in grease, soot, and motor oil that seemed to have seeped into their skin, which apparently came with the territory – you could not possibly look clean and polished so long as you were buried under one hood or another for 8 hours every day.

"No, you look… what's the word for it? Loopy."

Owen snorted. "Loopy? Who says _loopy_?"

Barry flashed a smile at him. "Is this about a girl? Come on, spill!"

Owen picked up a wrench and returned to looking for loose fasteners he needed to tighten before his job here was done, his gaze skimming over the underbelly of a '99 Chevrolet Malibu, following the curves and loops of tubes and hoses snaking before his eyes.

The shop was filled with a hollow sound of muffled voices, occasional clanking of metal on metal, and Bruce Springsteen singing on the radio, his voice fading in and out of the static in the concrete walls. Late afternoon sun was spilling through the windows tucked high near the ceiling, and the dust was dancing and swirling in the rays of light, not particularly bothered by the gravity, from the looks of it.

"As a matter of fact, it is," Owen admitted after a moment or two, amused.

"That's my man!" Barry let out a hearty laugh. "So, who's she? What's her name? Give me the deets."

Owen chuckled. "Her name is Harper."

"Dude, that's your daughter's name. That's sick."

"It _is_ about my daughter, you nutcase."

Barry huffed. "Okay, less fun, but I'm listening."

Owen pulled his toolbox closer and rummaged through it, searching for a socket wrench. "I signed her up for some classes at that place where I do the VA work. And, man, she's actually _talking_ , you know? Not just to me or Mrs. Carmichael, but to, like, that teacher of hers, and a bunch of kids who go there, too. I haven't seen her do that since-" He cut off, his face scrunched in effort as he turned the wrench a few times.

Since they stopped being a real family and turned into a Picasso painting of one, disproportionate and barely resembling the actual thing. All the required components were there, but they were not fitting the way they used to, or the way they should.

Instead of doing morning drills somewhere in Japan or the Middle East, he was working at Barry's shop five and a half days a week. It wasn't that bad a deal, though – in fact, Owen even liked it. There were rules to how engines worked, and he knew how to apply them to those that didn't. For someone with a degree in Engineering and some experience with military jets, this kind of job was a piece of cake. He could do it in his sleep.

The VA wasn't a planned gig, but one day several months ago, his current manager brought his old Ford to the shop for an annual check-up. They got to talking. One thing led to another, until Owen somehow found himself with a three-nights-a-week contract and his name on the goddamn poster, talking to the people who saw the world the same way he did. Much to his surprise, it sucked him right in. It was a relief to be back in his element again, except without sleeping in a tent and generally having a better quality of life, which made him feel more in balance somehow. Plus, he was allowed to use a gym and a pool whenever he wanted.

All in all, he had nothing to complain about. It just wasn't what he'd ever imagined his life to be.

Barry stayed quiet for a long moment. "And _that_ is why you look like you've won a lottery?"

"Sure feels like it." Owen tugged at one of the gas hoses to check if it was attached properly, his gaze accidentally slipping to his watch. "Oh, shit, we're gonna be late." He wheeled himself quickly from under the car and grabbed an oil-stained rag that was resting on the hood to wipe the worst of grime from his skin. "She's gonna kill me."

Barry emerged from under a big blue SUV, his face streaked with the motor oil. "Harper? She's two feet tall, man."

"Three," Owen muttered, tossing the rag into his toolbox and kicking it closed. "And no. Her teacher… ah, instructor. Whatever. She'd got this thing about tardiness." He straightened up and started to reach for his hair to smooth it down, but reconsidered, desperately needing to wash his hands properly first, or better yet – take a shower.

"An old lady with principles, huh?" Barry smirked.

Owen offered him a crooked smile. "She's got principles alright."

There was no point in going any further here.

In the past few months, Barry joked a couple of times about getting Owen 'back in the game', but he quickly dropped the subject – either due to his manners, or because of the how Owen's face contorted every time he brought it up. He didn't know – _couldn't_ know – what it was like to be with someone for 14 years, feeling like he won a jackpot, and then watch them die. Watch them fade away day by day until there was nothing left but a shell of a person he used to know. All their memories, the good days and the bad ones, all the laughs and tears and longing – all gone like they were never there.

Owen asked Harper once what her favourite memory of her mother was, and she told him it was their tea parties. Gathering her dolls and stuffed toys around a small table in her room and pretending the two of them were princesses.

He wished sometimes it was all he could remember, too. Not the hospitals and Jenny's pallid skin and her face scrunched with pain, or watching her sleep and wondering if she was going to wake up again, but their trips to the beach, and that time they took Harper to Disneyland for her 4th birthday. All the small moments bottled up for safekeeping.

This was not something one could get over in a blink of an eye and move on like nothing happened. Not that he wanted to, either. Keeping the memory of Jenny alive almost made him feel like she was still there, and the best way to do it was to hold on as tight as he could before it faded away. It frightened him. No, scratch that – it _terrified_ him out of his mind. At this point, memories were all he had, and if they were gone – who would he even be in the end? There was a nagging feeling in the pit of his stomach, telling him that it would happen regardless, whether he wanted to or not, but Owen pushed that small voice away and pretended he could cheat his way out of forgetting.

Owen checked the time again and grabbed his jacket. "If Ned calls, tell him I'll be finished by tomorrow afternoon, okay?"

"You got it." A screwdriver clenched between his teeth, Barry slid back under the car. "Tell Harper I said hi."

xoox

"I'm just saying it's not fair," Karen said, stirring her coffee vigorously. "Why do I get to do all the parenting and he still gets to spend half of the holidays with them?"

Recently divorced from her husband of nearly 20 years, she was trying to navigate the newly single-mom life with the grace and elegance of a bull in a china shop. All the simple things that neither she, nor Scott had to ever think about while they were living under the same roof suddenly turned into impossible problems. And the two boys caught in the crossfire didn't find it enjoyable in the least.

"I thought this is what your divorce agreement was supposed to be for," Claire reminded her sister, tearing a piece off her croissant and stuffing it into her mouth.

Karen glared at her. "I did not think it through, obviously."

The coffee shop located stark in the middle between Karen's office and Masrani Design where Claire was making the magic happen when she wasn't teaching ice-skating tricks to preschoolers was busy at lunchtime, smelling heavenly of fresh bread, sweet pastries, and bitter, strong coffee. It was warm, too, which was her one and only condition in response to her sister's invitation to have a quick bite together in a desperate need to vent about Scott's demand to have their sons over for Easter after _just_ celebrating New Year with them, which left Karen outraged. Understandably.

"I mean, he barely ever bothered to spend any time with them when we were living together, and now he's suddenly a father of the year?" Karen huffed. "And it's not like I can say no. We can discuss it, but he has the right…" She pursed her lips together and let out a frustrated huff.

"Come on, you know Scott loves them," Claire told her.

Karen scowled at her. "Whose side are you on?"

"Well, can you do anything about it? Change the arrangement?"

"I could put a hit on him, maybe," Karen grumbled under her breath.

"Thought so," Claire nodded. "But! You can do something about that _hideous_ couch of yours."

"Don't even start!"

"Honestly, Karen! I'm making other people's houses look stylish, but I can't help my only sister with a serious case of a very, very bad taste?"

"I swear to god, Claire-" She started with a warning.

And then someone shrieked, "Claire!" making a few heads turn. And the next moment, a small body slammed into her with enough force to nearly knock her chair over to the floor.

Claire's arms closed instinctively around all forty-five pounds of pure excitement that was Harper Grady, purple backpack slung over her shoulders and heavy curls falling down her back.

"Harper!"

They all looked up to the sound of Owen's voice booming over the lunchtime crowd to see him navigate his way between the tables with a takeout cup and a paper bag in his hand. He slowed down, the concerned lines creasing his face smoothing out when he saw Harper hanging from Claire's neck.

"Oh, hey," he said softer, his eyes darting quickly between Claire and Karen before settling on his daughter. "No running off, remember?"

The girl stepped back immediately, looking sheepish, but not particularly guilty. "I found Claire," she announced, making it sound like she'd just unearthed the biggest treasure known to the humankind.

"I can see that," Owen confirmed, turning properly to her at last.

They came back.

Claire wasn't sure they would, even despite the fact that Owen Grady was working roughly a hundred feet away from her several nights a week. But they did, fifteen minutes before the next class, Harper basically bouncing on the balls of her feet as she watched Claire finish her warm-up over the barrier that was almost too tall for her to see over it. Pulled up on her toes, her hands gripping the railing, she followed each of Claire's fluid moves, her expression utterly transfixed.

She said something to Owen – Claire couldn't hear what it was from this far away and with the music playing – and he smiled and picked her up in his arms to help her see better.

Claire lurched into a wide backwards crossover, using it as a set-up for a flip jump and wrapping up her routine with a spin, delighted by the rush of air around her and the blur of the world that only felt real to her when it was slightly out of focus.

Later, Harper told her that she'd only seen things like that on TV.

Claire leaned closer to her, dropping her voice as if she was telling her a secret. "I've learned it from TV."

"Really?" The girl's eyes were wide as saucers now.

"Mostly," she admitted, barely able to suppress her laughter.

They became a permanent fixture from then on. Three times a week, like clockwork, Owen and Harper Grady would walk through the doors. Sometimes, Owen would stay and watch the practice, other times he would wave his goodbye to Harper and come back in an hour, usually with a Cinnabon for his daughter, and once even with a cup of coffee for Claire. A simple gesture that she found beyond endearing – for its sincerity, if nothing else.

They never talked again after that Saturday evening, though, when he popped in after the gym with a heap of apologies, and he never once came by while she was practicing on the days when there were no classes. Not that Claire expected him to.

Owen Grady was an interesting man, witty and quick with smart comebacks, fun to talk to and, generally, very pleasant. Not to mention the whole dimples thing going on and the shoulders so broad he could probably carry the whole world on them without breaking a sweat. And tall too, his eyes smiling down at her from his generous height of 6'2". But, at the end of the day, it didn't matter. He was her student's father. And on top of that, he also kept a pointed distance, and she had long learned not to mistaken politeness for something else.

"Hi," Claire beamed at him to compensate for the five seconds of territorial fear his daughter had caused him. Across the table from her, Karen cleared her throat, and Claire finally remembered she was there. "Oh, Owen, this is my sister, Karen. Karen, this is Owen Grady, we… um, work together. And Harper here," she tapped the girl on the nose with her index finger, "comes to my classes."

They exchanged quick handshakes and a few pleasantries before Owen was back in a business mode. "Sorry to cut this short, but we really have to go," he said. "Here's your chocolate." The cup made its way from his hand into Harper's.

"Yeah, speaking of which," Claire nodded. "We should probably go, too."

She dropped a few bills on the table to cover their check and rose from her seat, and so did Karen, both of them reaching for their coats.

"Wow," Owen whistled under his breath, giving Claire an amused once-over. "You can walk."

"Pardon me?" Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

"It's just," he coughed, "I never saw you without your skates before. Kinda thought they were growing out of your legs or something."

"You too, huh?" Karen hummed and Harper giggled as Claire's jaw dropped.

"The world is full of surprises," she deadpanned.

A small smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. "So I see. You," Owen pointed his finger at his daughter, "door. Now." His phone started to ring somewhere in his pocket. "Excuse me, I really need to—" He nudged Harper to the exit with a quick wave of goodbye over his shoulder. "Nice meeting you."

"Likewise," Karen called after him, and turned to her sister, her eyes gleaming with a dangerous interest. "Okay, what was _that_?"

Claire pulled on her coat, struggling with thick, uncooperative buttons all designer items seemed to be so fond of and mentally swearing off everything that didn't come from Sears from then on. "I told you, we work together." Together, in the same building – same difference.

"No, you don't," Karen followed her to the door. "I know everyone you work with, and they're all gay."

"Not Lowery," Claire protested, stepping out into a bright, chilly afternoon.

"Don't get me started on Lowery," Karen rolled her eyes as the door shut closed behind them. "He's bald. And he has dinosaur figurines strewn all over his desk. And what kind of name is _Lowery_ , anyway?"

"Ouch! Petty much?"

"Would you go out with him?" Karen demanded.

"Well, no," Claire admitted.

"My point exactly, so stop changing the subject. What's this guy's deal?" Her sister looked up and down the street, searching for Owen and Harper among the other passers-by.

Claire tightened her scarf around her neck, squinting in the sunlight and kicking herself mentally for forgetting her gloves in the office. "You saw a wedding ring and a kid, right?" She asked, hesitant to go into the dead wife story for the reason she couldn't quite explain even to herself.

It was bad enough Karen was on her case about 'fixing' her love life for years now, but dragging innocent bystanders into it felt plain cruel. Besides, the details didn't matter – one look at Owen Grady was enough to see that he was still deeply and unapologetically married. To a ghost, to the memories, to whatever kept him going. If there was one thing Claire could understand better than anyone, it was holding on to the past.

She buried her hands deeper into the pockets of her coat and gave Karen a pointed look. "Now, can we _please_ talk about your ex-husband some more?"

xoox

The nights were still the worst, their loud silence filling Owen's head with the thoughts that threated to crack him open and turn him inside out. Sometimes he wondered how his mind could contain them all without exploding. And then he wondered if it was ever going to go away, this feeling that he was surviving instead of living.

Owen pulled a bottle of beer out of the fridge and flicked the cap off, his eyes trained on the window and the darkness outside, at his own reflection that looked nothing like anyone he could recognize.

None of this was supposed to be happening.

He was supposed to still be on active duty for another fourteen months, not stuck in a place he fought so hard to get away from – not because it was bad, but because the rest of the world always seemed so big to him it felt like a shame not to be trying to see it all. His daughter was not supposed to have gone for three months without talking, scaring the living hell out of him and a few therapists. There was a moment when Owen was convinced he'd never hear her voice again until he heard her singing her toys to sleep one night, a full month before she spoke to him again. She was not supposed to be crying because she missed her mother while he felt helpless and useless, a joke of a father.

His wife wasn't supposed to be dead, period.

Harper loved him. He knew she did. Ever since she was old enough to recognize him, she would crawl, and then waddle, and then run to the door whenever he'd come back home from another tour. She would climb into his arms. She would fall asleep on his chest with her chubby fist closed over his shirt in the middle of telling him a story. She would rush to him to get away from the injustices her 'evil' mother would push on her – like brushing her teeth or picking up her toys, and his heart would swell in his chest every time with more love he ever thought he was capable of feeling.

But _that_ was easy. _That_ he knew how to do. The wrath of Harper Marie Lynn Grady over the wrong brand of cereal or her refusal to leave the house unless she was wearing the _right_ skirt was something else entirely.

The one thing that no one mentioned to him before he got sucked into this big black hole was that parenting was considered a team sport for a reason. Before, it felt almost effortless. Like he and Jenny could make no mistake. Sure, there were some bumps in the road; they had their issues, no one was perfect – and so on, and so forth. Owen tended to be a good cop to Jenny's bad one, sneaking an extra cookie to his kid and closing his eyes on her small mischiefs. Granted, it would've been hard to be anything else, what with him being gone a good half of a year, but he'd always found consolation in knowing that there would be time for everything else, that he'd have the rest of his life to catch up.

Man, was he wrong about that!

Now, he felt like he was trying to swim in the middle of the ocean with one arm locked behind his back. He knew how to diffuse a bomb and use just about any kind of firearms there was, but hell if he had any idea how to make his own child eat her vegetables, or how to braid her hair, or how to be both parents at the same time. He probably felt just as trapped as Harper who had no one else to turn to whenever Owen hit a brick wall.

They were both tired, and he couldn't help but wonder sometimes if he was even cut out for this, for this whole parenting thing that he clearly wasn't excelling at. And if he wasn't – what was he supposed to do?

And then there was Claire Dearing.

It wasn't anything personal. He knew little about her and, frankly, didn't care much about the rest, but there was something almost meditative about her effortless routines that tended to soothe the storms raging in his mind. The way she was flying, weightless, barely touching the pale, cold surface beneath the sharp blades of her ice-skates…

Maybe he also needed help, Owen thought with dismay. Maybe he was losing it. Maybe this was the long overdue PTSD everyone at the meetings was talking about and that he foolishly believed he managed to avoid. His mother had suggested a few times that he maybe he should talk to someone, get another opinion, a different perspective. Nothing permanent, she stressed. Just something to help him get through the worst of it.

At the time, her offer seemed almost laughable – the _worst_ of it? As opposed to what?

But what if she wasn't that far off?

"Daddy?"

Startled, he turned around to find Harper standing in the doorway, her hands clasped around the toy bunny he'd gotten for her when she was born. Blinking in the bright light, she was rubbing her eyes, her dark curls falling down her pajama-clad shoulders.

"Hey, baby, what are you doing up so late?"

He put the bottle down and crouched in front of her.

"Bad dream." Harper reached for him, wrapping her arms around his neck, the toy trapped between them.

"It's just a dream." Owen gathered her in his arms and kissed her hair, shocked once again by how big she was getting. Not by his stands maybe, but he still remembered the days when she could fit in the cupped palms of his hands, so tiny he was scared to break her. And then in just a blink of an eye they were suddenly here, and now he had no idea how it happened. "It's not real. C'mon, let's get you back to bed. You want me to read you something?"

She rested her head on his shoulder, her eyes already drooping sleepily. "Tell me a story."

"About what?"

"Dragons."

Owen nudged the door to her room open with his shoulder, careful not to trip on the toys scattered all over the floor and lowered her down, already asleep.

He pulled her blanket over her and tucked her in, wondering not without a twinge of terror in his stomach just how much of his daughter's life and his own he was not seeing because he didn't know where to look.

xoox

A couple of weeks later, Claire found Harper sitting on the bleachers after everyone else had already left, a book in her lap and a tip of a pencil in her mouth, her forehead creased in concentration.

"Hey, honey," Claire stopped in front of the girl who looked up instantly. "Where's your dad?"

Harper's eyes darted toward the door. "Probably running later," she answered, looking somewhat uncertain, although not particularly troubled. "He's coming any moment now."

"It's okay," Claire assured her, then folded her arms in front of her on the barrier between them. "What are you doing?"

"Homework," Harper muttered, her face puckering with displeasure. And then she snapped her head up, her features lighting up momentarily. "Can you do the spin things for me?" She asked with the barely contained excitement she no longer tried to hold back.

Where was the gloomy little thing Owen first brought here back in January? It was quite incredible to watch her shed the layers of caution and distrust and step out of her shell, revealing a real gem of a truly delightful person underneath.

There was so much life inside her, so much hunger and excitement for everything the world could offer.

Claire laughed and pushed the gate open, stepping off the ice. "I have a better idea." She lowered down into the chair next to Harper. "Let's finish your homework and then I'll teach you how to do them. What do you say?"

When Owen burst through the doors half an hour later, Harper's homework was done and was sitting in her backpack, and she was doing small, awkward twirls in the middle of the rink, right in the center of a pale spotlight, her hand clasped tightly around Claire's and her laughter scattering around the cool room and echoing under the ceiling.

He stopped short, panting and relieved beyond measure, and so did they, turning to him at the same time, hands clasped together.

"Daddy!" Harper let go of Claire and moved toward him, breathless and grinning from ear to ear. "Have you seen my spins?"

"Sure did!" He ruffled her hair fondly, earning a stink eye from the girl for doing that. "I'm so sorry," he said to Claire when she joined them. "I got caught up in—I'm sorry, it won't happen again, I swear."

"Don't be, it's fine," Claire promised him quickly. "We had fun." She ran her hand over Harper's head absently, smiling down at her. "Didn't we?"

"Come on, champ, go get your boots," Owen told his daughter, then sunk heavily against the barrier and ran his hand through his hair that was already sticking out in every direction from his trot from the parking lot and down a long corridor. "Thank you," he mouthed to Claire, a smile coming through his voice.

"We did the homework, too," she informed him conspiratorially.

He scoffed. "I hope _she_ did at least _some_ of it."

By the time they were ready to leave, Claire had also gathered her things and was head for the exit, her hair pulled into a sloppy ponytail. Owen pushed the door open for her after she turned off the lights and scooped Harper in his arms while she locked up, shifting her bag from her left shoulder to the right and pocketing her keys.

She followed them to the exit and out into the cold night, the soles of her practical shoes lined with fur squeaking on the linoleum. Having to actually get used to walking after several hours on the ice never ceased to amaze Claire, the sensation almost as alien as having to move on all fours or upside down, making gliding feel more natural than anything else.

"Hey, you need a ride or anything?" Owen turned to Claire once they reached the parking lot and he stopped near his jeep.

"Thank you, Mr. Grady, but I've got a ride right here," she nodded toward a silver Toyota parked two cars down from his and stuffed her hands deeper into the pockets of her overcoat, searching for the quickly dissipating warmth.

Harper giggled, wiggling in his arms to turn to Claire. "Why did you call daddy 'Mr. Grady'?"

"It's his name," Claire looked up at her.

"Yes, but only for the work people, not friends," the girl informed her with the air of utmost authority.

"Is that what we are, huh?" She asked Owen, her head tilted to her shoulder.

"You tell me, Ms. Dearing," he told her, straightening up and holding her gaze for a second or two longer than necessary, and suddenly she was not amused anymore, her smile slipping off. "Well," he coughed when the moment started to stretch, pulling his head a bit into his neck against the sharp gusts of wind. "Thanks, again, for watching Harper tonight. I really appreciate it."

"It was no trouble at all," she promised him and started toward her car, but then stopped and turned to him again just as he opened the door and positioned his daughter in her seat in the back. "Owen?"

"Yeah?" He straightened up.

 _Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it…_

"It usually takes me about an hour to clean up a bit and, I don't know, collect the forgotten gloves, finish some paperwork. Stuff like that." She chewed on her lip for a few seconds, watching his expression in the dim light of streetlamps running along the perimeter of this small parking lot, his face streaked with shadows and almost completely unreadable. "If you need to be late again, for whatever reason, don't worry about it. I'll make sure that everything is okay with Harper."

He stared at her for a long moment without saying a word, then tapped his fingers on the roof of his car and nodded slowly. "Thanks, I… I'll try not to make a habit out of it," he said in that weird voice that felt like a touch of velvet to her skin. "And, Claire?" A pause. "You're something else. You know that, right?"

"So I've heard," she brushed him off nonchalantly, more for her own benefit than his.

xoox

It started with a snowstorm that swept in fast and furious one day in late February. All week, the meteorologists swore their heads off, promising that it would move up north, heading toward Canada, barely even grazing Wisconsin. Instead, it seemingly decided to bury the whole state in one giant snowbank until it was tucked safely under a thick, white blanket.

By the time the weather channels finally issued an alert, warning everyone to stay at home or, at the very least, avoid driving, the world had turned into white chaos. Angry wind was throwing handfuls of snow at the windshield of Owen's car, the wipers working at the top speed to no avail. He leaned over the steering wheel as if it could help him see better, but in the sea of head- and taillights, he was nothing but a dot on a map. Another car stuck in the middle of a massive traffic jam caused by multiple accidents somewhere ahead of him.

He turned on the radio, trying to find the updates, hoping to maybe make it to the next intersection and turn onto a side street and away from this mayhem, but words of the newscaster were fading in and out, the reception spotty and interrupted by the weather, and after a while he had no choice but to turn it off and hope for the best.

He tapped his fingers restlessly on the steering wheel, peering ahead at the swirls of white outside his car. He was late. He was late to pick up Harper, and it was probably only a matter of time before he hopped out of the goddamned car to go get her on foot. The only problem with that plan was that he didn't think he'd cover one block before ending up buried in the snow. And that was not going to get his daughter home.

His eyebrows pulled together when the car in front of him eased forward, and he all but breathed a sigh of relief only to hit the brakes again not even ten feet later, causing the vehicle behind him to let out a honk of protest. "Right there with ya, buddy," Owen muttered, glancing into the rearview mirror.

Sick with worry, he checked his watch

And that was when his phone began to ring.

xoox

The power went out just as Claire finished the class, and in the sudden darkness and silence, she could hear the wind howling in the vents, the tree branches scraping against the roof and the walls of the building. A short panic ensued among the kids and parents alike, and a few tears were shed before the situation got under control and Claire managed to see everybody out in the light of the cellphone flashlights.

Everybody except one.

Owen still wasn't there, and the building manager was asking everyone to vacate the premises as it was dictated by the safety protocol. Power surges apparently rose the risk of fire – which Claire didn't want to think of – and therefore extreme weather conditions required immediate evacuation, leaving her with a frightened Harper Grady on her hands.

There was nothing she could do but call Owen – he insisted she had his phone number after the last time he was late picking his daughter up – and tell him to come get Harper from Claire's place, an old house a few blocks away from the Community Center. It used to belong to her parents and where she'd been living since they passed away five years ago, reluctant to sell it despite the fact that it was too big for just one person and required constant maintenance. Karen kept pestering her about it, pointing out that it was _criminally_ impractical. But Claire liked it, she liked the vibe of it, and the memories its walls held, and all the small things in-between.

And at the moment, it was either taking Harper there, or waiting for him outside in her car, and quite frankly, that sounded downright dreadful. It was cold, the girl was probably tired, and if it was up to Claire, the decision would be a no brainer. But Owen was her father, and his had to be the final word.

"Owen?" There was a long pause on the line when Claire voiced her suggestion, interrupted by the static and honking on his end, and what she thought was a wail of an ambulance siren, and she could almost _hear_ him think, weighing the pros and cons of her offer.

" _Yeah, okay_." He cleared his throat. And then he asked her to text him the address.

When he appeared on Claire's doorstep almost an hour later, smelling not unpleasantly of motor oil, his jacket unzipped and his hair dusted with the snow, Harper was happily snacking on chocolate chip cookies and humming some tune under her breath while she was drawing something that could be both a whale and a rabbit at the kitchen table. She threw herself at her father with a squeal, climbing into his arms and telling him about how Claire had ' _all_ the books' and a real 'grown-up drawing table', referring to her stand-up drafting desk tucked in the corner of the living room where she worked now and then if she fell behind on her projects.

"Does she, really?" Owen asked, his eyes darting between his daughter and Claire who looked… homey in her leggings and oversized University of Wisconsin sweatshirt. "Why don't you get your things, honey, and we'll get going?" He set Harper down and turned to Claire. "Look, I'm so sorry…"

"Don't," she stopped him, raising her hand. "It wasn't your fault, and we were both kind of tired, so I did have some ulterior motives for bringing her here." And then, "Although kidnapping wasn't one of them."

Owen chuckled, rubbing his forehead. "Yeah, I sorta figured that out. It's just, um…" He shook his head, grimacing a little. "This never happened before. Not like that, and I thought she'd be mad because there was this one time I had to pick her up late from her Grandma's and she wouldn't talk to me until the next day, but… I kinda didn't expect the storm to get this bad so fast." He let out a long breath. "That doesn't sound good, does it?"

Claire pushed her hair back from her face, her gaze softening. "Sounds okay," she told him. They both glanced into the living-room where the girl was carefully putting her books and papers and a Winnie-the-Pooh pencil bag into her backpack. "I get it. It's just the two of you, and it not easy. And I was glad to help."

Owen's features relaxed and he nodded, watching her closely as she watched his daughter, for some reason only now noticing a dusting of golden freckles sprinkled over Claire's nose – the same shade as paler wisps of hair at her temples. And the vanilla scent—Owen first thought was that it was from a pie or something, but now he would bet his very soul on it coming from her skin, washing over him each time she moved, and his stomach clenched at the that thought in response to something he hadn't felt in so long he didn't think he still could.

Back a few months ago, when he first saw her at the Community Center, Claire was more of an oddity than a person, someone so different from everyone Owen had ever known he couldn't wrap his mind around the fact that she was even real. Then she started working with Harper and once again, she was there but also not really, a fleeting presence he never bothered to actually register, too engrossed in his own life to pay proper attention to anything outside of it.

In a way, it was easy to convince himself he wasn't really _seeing_ her, if only because he wasn't quite willing to admit even to himself that she wasn't entirely unattractive. (Screw that, she was drop-dead gorgeous with that mane of copper-red hair that seemingly hated to be pulled into buns and braids, always struggling to break free, and the lively deep-green eyes – he was grieving, not blind.) And the realization stirred something inside him. Something he was not supposed or _allowed_ to feel for a woman who was not his wife.

"The thing is, it's like no matter how much time has passed, this whole single parent thing still feels like walking blindfold on a mine field," he said in a whoosh of breath, if only to say _something_ , do anything that wasn't staring at Claire. "Half the time, I have no idea what I'm doing."

"You're doing well," she assure him. "Trust me. Granted, I can't speak from personal experience, but if everyone tried half as hard as you do, this world would be a better place."

He laughed shakily at that. "Wow, that was profound."

She shrugged, not at all perplexed by his reaction. "Yeah, well… I have multitudes." And then added, "I also have a suggestion." A pause. "I can watch Harper after her lessons if you need to work late."

"Okay," Owen drawled slowly, eyeing her with suspicion. "That sounds too good to be true. What's the catch?"

Claire wrinkled her nose. "My car is all yours the next time it breaks down on me."

He considered her words, still not convinced she was not joking. "Seriously, what's the catch?" She cocked an eyebrow at him, and his expression turned grave. "Are you seriously offering to babysit my daughter?"

"I'm offering you a chance not to have to pull her out of the program even if it clashes with your work schedule," she countered. _That, and I'm probably losing my mind_ , she added in her head.

"I can't ask that of you, Claire."

"You're not, it was my idea. You don't have to say yes." She watched a battle of emotions sweep across his face, and then it got impossible to hold his gaze, so she tore hers away, choosing to study the old wallpaper she kept promising herself to change every spring but never got around to doing it because what was that saying about cobbler's children having no shoes? "It doesn't make much difference to me, so unless you have other options…"

Crap, Owen thought. This was too much, wasn't it?

The problem was, he _didn't_ have other options. Not really. His mother was not driving anymore – her eyesight had dropped significantly in the past couple of years and even though she remained fully functional otherwise, she decided to stop using her car for the sake of her own and everyone else's safety. Mrs. Carmichael wasn't driving, period. None of them would walk three miles in frigid weather to pick up Harper after her practice and take her home if he was late.

The girl had a few babysitters after Jenny had passed away but it never quite worked out for anyone – she wasn't comfortable around strangers, drawing deeper into herself when forced to interact with them against her will, and Owen could tell it was causing her harm rather than helping either of them. And he simply couldn't afford to let them both slip back into the time when she remained silent and withdrawn for so long he feared it would become permanent.

Claire was right. His only other choice would be to pull her out of ice-skating completely and simply have her stay with Mrs. Carmichael after school, but something told him that this would probably be the worst possible scenario. For some reason – well, for about a thousand of them, from where he was standing – Harper loved Claire Dearing, and Owen loved the way she was around his kid. Attentive but never patronizing, and comfortable too, without the extra layer of pity he'd noticed about some of Harper's school teachers who were nearly tearing up at the sight of a poor motherless girl, setting his teeth on edge.

He didn't have to say yes, that was true. But he hardly could say no, either.

Finally, when the girl hauled her backpack and a handful of other stuff into the hallway, Owen reached for her coat and crouched down in front of his daughter to help her put it on.

"Honey, what do you think about staying with Claire here after your lessons sometimes?" He asked her, considering that it had to be her decision in the end as his fingers worked rather clumsily on a small zipper of her puffed parka. "You know, like today?"

Harper's mouth dropped open, her gaze shifted to Claire first and then back to Owen. "Every time?" She asked, incredulous.

"No, not every time," Owen responded quickly, and Claire had to cover her snort with a cough. "Not at all. Just… some days when I have to pick up extra work. What's you say?"

The girl glanced at Claire again, chewing on her lip. (Like Claire did when she was thinking hard about something. Sweet Jesus, his daughter was already picking up her habits.) Then she lifted her arms to have Owen pick her up and looked seriously into his face when he complied, her eyebrows knitted together. "Can it be _every_ time?"

He grinned, and so it was set.

xoox

The first time Owen saw not his wife's chocolate brown eyes in his dream, but Claire's green ones, he woke up with a start, tangled in sweat-soaked sheets, his heart beating out of his chest. The dream was nothing but a smudge in his mind, the details of it erased from his memory the second he opened his eyes, but his stomach was in knots.

He didn't know where it came from, or what he was supposed to do about it, but it left him nauseous and disoriented, and worst of all, unable to summon up the image of Jenny without looking at her picture. Every time he closed his eyes, he'd see Claire's smile.

 **To be continued...**

* * *

 **A/N:** I'll do my best to update as soon as I can! The pace of the story will actually pick up a bit in the next part, so that should be fun.

Reviews are love! Please let me know what you think!


	3. Chapter 3

**Author's note** : This part wasn't due until next week, but it's done so you can have it earlier. Thanks for all the love, guys! You have no idea how much it means to me ❤

* * *

"You did _what_?" Owen gaped at Claire in disbelief, his jaw hanging open.

It was a Tuesday night in March, and a stormy one at that, with the wind howling outside and the snow lashing out angrily at the world, furious and enraged by the prospect of having to step back and give way to the spring soon. Harper was watching _Sponge Bob_ in Claire's living room, a box of crayons spilled in front of her on the carpet, after talking Owen into giving her '5 more minutes' three times in a row.

It took them several weeks to settle into a new routine – if Owen was running late, Claire would give him something like 40 minutes during which she'd tidy up the place or teach Harper a move or two. The girl was a natural, throwing herself into the practice with abandon and chatting a mile a minute while doing so. She never shied away from an extra challenge, mesmerized by Claire's majestic grace and the techniques she'd showed her in the past month or two.

Afterwards, if Owen still was not there, Claire would text him, gather Harper's stuff and drive them both to her place. They'd eat, finish up on Harper's homework if necessary and watch TV or play Go Fish, or she'd simply give the girl some paper and pencils to keep her entertained as they waited for Owen to come get her.

"We had grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner," Claire repeated, if a little cautiously this time. "Is that a problem?"

Once they agreed on their arrangement, Owen provided her with the basic information and phone numbers – his, even though she already had it, his mother's, his next door neighbor's who was watching Harper now and then, as well as her school's, just in case, assuring Claire that his daughter had no allergies, to his knowledge, or any other dietary restrictions. He asked her to maybe steer clear of anything age-inappropriate on TV and not allow Harper to play with her makeup (apparently his wife had a thing about that), but that was it.

In retrospect, maybe there were healthier food options for a five-year old other than buttery bread stuffed with cheese, Claire had to admit that much, but he was looking at her like she'd talked his kid into jumping off a bridge or… okay, she was fresh out of analogies here. He was freaking out, and it was freaking _her_ out, even though she could not, for the life of her, see why.

Owen rubbed his cheek, the stubble scratching the palm of his hand that smelled faintly of gasoline even though he all but scrubbed his skin off an hour earlier, trying to wash it off. He craned his neck to peek at Harper across the hall, singing along with the into song, and then turned to Claire who was filling the dishwasher with cups and plates, her hair veiling her face every time she looked down. "It's not a problem," he said, dumbfounded, after a long pause. "It's a miracle."

She scoffed, relieved, and slammed the dishwater door closed, pushing her hair out of her eyes. "Yeah, I don't think you understand the definition-"

"No, _you_ don't understand," he dropped his voice. "It's been Cheerios for breakfast, PB &J sandwich for lunch, and goddamn pasta for dinner. Every. Single. Day. For months! I didn't even know she was capable of eating anything else."

Claire hummed and folded her arms over her chest. "Well, did you _try_ giving her something else?" She asked, which earned her a tight-lipped grumble in the back on his throat and a dirty look. Hands raised in surrender, she shook her head. "You did."

It was an odd dance they were doing, and half the time she felt like she didn't know the steps.

In the month since she'd offered to let Harper play in her living room now and then, Owen was undeniably going out of his way to be at the Community Center on time to collect his daughter after the practice, barely ever a few minutes late. Like he didn't trust Claire, although she could clearly see it wasn't the case. More like he was trying to prove to her that he could, after all, easily juggle his two jobs, the school runs, and Harper's extracurricular activities as if it was no big deal. Or maybe to prove it to himself, Claire couldn't quite decide.

As a result, Harper only came over a handful of times, giddy and excited whenever it happened. It was obvious she craved interaction that went beyond the one she had with her classmates and her father. She adored Owen, that much was clear, but in the absence of a mother whose memory was still fresh in her mind, she latched onto Claire, her eyes sparkling alive every time she'd step onto the ice or get to chat with her for a few minutes and share a story or two about her school or going to Owen's work or her neighbour's poodle named Marcel. It was impossible not to get attached to her, and before she knew it was happening, Claire started to feel the claws of affection toward Harper Grady sink deep into her soul.

As for Owen, Claire's relationship with him morphed into something akin a cautious friendship that consisted of bantering about nothing and walking on eggshells around everything else.

She told him about snagging an internship at Masrani Design after graduating from the Art School of the University of Wisconsin seven years ago, which eventually turned into a career, and explained that she started teaching a while back because it gave her unrestricted access to the rink at all times in-between. It terrified her at first, her inexperience in dealing with the children seeping out of every crack in her armour, but she grew to enjoy it, delighted by their energy and genuine eagerness to learn even when there was no reward waiting for them down the road.

Owen, in his turn, shared a few stories from his time in the NAVY, telling her about the training base in Japan where he got to try boiled locusts and whale meat, and about living in a tent for several months during an operation in the Middle East – he vowed to never underappreciate the indoor plumbing ever again. He answered her curious questions patiently, peppering his tales with hilarious anecdotes about the language barriers and the lack of proper navigation in the places that didn't know what GPS was.

And in all this time, he hadn't mentioned his dead wife once, which only made her looming presence so much more notable. Claire wondered sometimes if he could feel it as sharply as she did.

Yet, there was easiness to their conversations, the light jokes that somehow didn't seem forced or overbearing. However, Claire chalked it up to the fact that he was simply grateful for her involvement with his daughter. Once, he even asked her to join them for a movie, but it was clearly nothing but a polite gesture, and obviously Harper's idea, so she declined the invitation, offering him a quick excuse she forgot five minutes later, uncertain of whether she saw a flicker of relief or disappointment on his face and choosing not to overthink it.

"Owen Grady?" Karen stared at her for a solid minute when Claire mentioned their situation to her a couple of weeks ago when she came over for dinner. " _The_ Owen Grady? _My-shoulders-are-larger-than-life_ Owen Grady?"

Claire rolled her eyes. "Maybe. His _full_ name never came up." She shrugged, feeling inexplicably defensive and oddly jealous of her nephews who were fighting over a video game in the living room instead of having to endure Karen's speculative scrutiny. "And what was I supposed to do? Leave the little girl alone in the parking lot?"

"So you decided to adopt her?"

"Why are you complaining?" Claire countered. " You are always on my case about having a child of my own."

"I didn't mean it like-" Karen cut herself off when she realized it was a joke. "Stop deflecting. I thought he was married."

Claire flinched a little, feeling trapped and kicking herself mentally for bringing it up at all. "Well, not strictly speaking…"

Karen leveled her sister with her best _unimpressed_ look. "You're making no sense."

"He lost his wife… ah, that would be about nine or ten months ago now, I think? Cancer."

Karen's face fell. "Oh, his poor kid." She propped her chin on her hand, studying Claire across the table as the timer on the oven kept ticking the seconds away. "And then there's you."

"Yup, _babysitting_. You can bond a lot with people when you do a 12-year-old's job for them," Claire deadpanned. "It's not like that, I swear. We're just friends."

"Well, I'm sure there's-"

"Work ethics. Lots of it."

"You're no fun," Karen sighed.

Clare flashed a bright smile at her. "I have you for that."

It was easier that way, Claire decided in the end. It was easier to pretend she didn't care rather than to admit that she wasn't entirely unattaracted to a very emotionally unavailable man with a seriously messed up life and a baggage so heavy she wondered sometimes how he wasn't crumbling under its weight with every step he took. Wondered how he kept on breathing without suffocating.

Owen was funny and charming, and he loved his daughter, and he also seemed to be as attainable as the moon. Jesus, the man had been looking right _through_ her for as long as she'd known him. And so Claire pushed those thoughts away, shoved them into the darkest corner of her heart, locked the door, and threw away the key. There was no one else to know the truth but her, and she liked it that way.

"What's your secret?" Owen asked meanwhile, pulling her out of her thoughts.

"Hm?" Claire blinked at him.

He leaned against the cooking counter, watching her with a curious expression – like he was trying to read her mind. (The thought resonated with an unsettling tug in her stomach.) "You've done something I didn't even think was possible, and I really wanna know how." He picked up an apple from the bowl sitting next to his elbow and sank his teeth into it.

Claire grinned at him. "You never said that pasta was mandatory. I didn't think to offer it."

Her phone started to chirp at the same time as someone rang the doorbell, startling them both.

"Could you…" she began, her eyes darting toward the hallway as she reached for her mobile, and Owen nodded and peeled away from the counter. "Beware though, it might be my sister," she called after him before pressing Accept. "Hi, Mr. Masrani… No, of course, not… I actually finished it and sent it for confirmation." She rubbed her forehead, listening to Simon Masrani ramble on about his meeting with a potential corporate client scheduled for tomorrow and nodding occasionally even though he couldn't see her.

"Claire?" Owen called from the hall a few moments later, and she quickly wrapped up the conversation, promising Mr. Masrani to double check everything first thing in the morning.

Jason Reed was standing by the door when she stepped out of the kitchen, sizing up Owen with one measured look after another. Tall and lanky, he seemed to be taking up whatever little space was left there after Owen Grady filled the rest of it, the air around them charged with tension that almost buzzed like electrical static. He turned to Claire – not with hostility exactly, but with a certain air of betrayal and disbelief, a deep frown creasing her forehead, which was odd, coming from someone she'd been broken up with for over four months.

"Jason?" Claire found her voice somehow, her stomach uncomfortably hollow. Then glanced at Owen who seemingly grew a foot taller in the presence of a stranger, his gaze heavy. Then remembered to introduce them. The men nodded to one another, but neither made an attempt to go for the handshake. If anything, both seemed to be tempted to reach for one another's jugular, and if she could understand it in Jason, with Owen it made no sense whatsoever. "What are you doing here?" She asked at last, her chin tipped up and her arms folded over her chest.

Jason was a representative of one of Claire's former clients about a year ago. One day, he stopped by to sign some papers and left with her phone number in his pocket. Their relationship was comfortable and convenient, if nothing else. No tides, no currents, just a smooth surface of a lake on a sunny day, undisturbed by the breeze. It wasn't that they were comfortable in their silences – it was that they didn't need anything else, and not in a good way. For her, it was a red flag. For Jason, for some reason, it seemed to be a sign of success.

He was so surprised when she offered to call it quits about six months later it would've been funny had the moment been slightly less dramatic. For all Claire knew, he still had no idea what pushed her to do it, harbouring a hope she'd come to her senses one of these days.

"You mentioned my stuff…" Jason started, and she jerked her head toward a plain cardboard box without any markings sitting under the hook rack, choosing not to comment on how she said it to him two months ago and he was lucky it was still here and not in the trash. "Right." He picked up the box, then gave Owen another once-over. "Well, you seem to have moved on quickly, Claire."

"Thanks for calling before stopping by," she said flatly.

"I didn't-" He began and cut himself off with a cough. "I didn't expect to interrupt anything _important_."

"Claire!" Harper burst out of the living room. "Come here! You have to see-" She skidded to an abrupt halt at the sight of a stranger, and Claire habitually reached for her, picking the girl up. Harper's arms wrapped tightly around her neck as she peeked at Jason from under her hair that fell on her face, her small body tense.

"In a minute, honey," Claire promised.

With a snicker, Jason pulled the door open without so much as a goodbye, allowing the cold air mixed with a handful of snow to rush into the house, and then slammed in with a loud bang behind him. And Claire finally remembered to exhale, her ears ringing for a second or two.

"Who was that?" Harper whispered, her fingers tangled in Claire's hair.

"No one," Claire turned to her, a smile in place. "Just an old friend. So, you were saying…."

The girl looked at Owen whose eyes were still locked on the door, his hands flexing ever so slightly, curling into fists and then uncurling and then tightening again, although it was impossible to tell if he knew he was doing it or not.

"Daddy, did you tell her?" She demanded.

"Tell me what?" Claire eyes shifted from the one to another.

"Oh." Owen pressed a palm to his forehead. "Of course." The line of his shoulders relaxed at last, the crease between his eyebrows smoothed out, and a tight set of his lips curved into a one-sided grin. "Ms. Dearing, you're hereby officially invited to-"

"My birthday party!" Harper finished for him with excitement, her eyes sparkling. "Next Saturday!"

"I am? Really?" Claire felt her smile stretch wider as something warm blossomed in her stomach spreading all over her body like honey melting in the sun. "I'd be a fool to say no." When Harper ran back off to her cartoons, she straightened up and turned to Owen. "I'm sorry... for this—I had no idea he was going to show up like this."

"I gathered that much," Owen said. "Everything okay with you and…" His gaze flickered toward the door, the territorial look on the other man's face seared into his memory, flaring up something dark and scary and hot inside him, making his blood boil.

"Yeah, it is, actually. Which, I think, is the problem." Claire pinched the bridge of her nose with a huff of frustration. "Jason and I, we ended our _whatever_ on rather good terms and apparently he decided that it was still salvageable."

"Is it?"

She dropped her hand to her side to find Owen standing closer to her than she anticipated, his blue eyes pensive and clear, and more than a little troubled. She didn't even need to try hard to convince herself that there was more to it than idle curiosity to his gaze. And there it was again, a nervous flurry in her chest that was growing progressively harder to ignore.

"No. God, no!" She let out a short, unsteady laugh, shaking her head. "Look, Owen, I shouldn't have allowed him to think that you and I… That we-" There was no way to make this not sound awkward, and now that the whole incident was over, she could feel her cheeks grow hot, making her wish the floor would open beneath her feet and swallow her whole. Jesus Christ... "I'm sorry for dragging you into my personal issues. I crossed the line and it was unacceptable."

"Nah, glad I could help," Owen told her easily and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, his sweater stretching over his chest, _damn you, Karen!_ "Also… you don't have to do the birthday thing if you don't want to, Claire, or if you have other plans. I swear it's fine."

"Are you kidding me?" Her mouth dropped open in mock-indignation. "Six-year-olds get the best cakes!"

xoox

Claire started swimming after her first surgery. It was meant to be a part of her physical therapy aimed at bringing the life back into her sore muscles and weak joints after several months of being practically bedridden. Her doctor kept going on and on and on about building up her strength through low-impact exercises to speed up the recovery.

At the time, it didn't matter. At the time, Claire didn't care. Her life was falling apart before her eyes, and no matter how much she tried, she couldn't see any future beyond tomorrow. One day after another was all she had. Anything else was either frightening, or downright dreadful.

Claire succumbed, though, more for the sake of getting everyone off her back than anything else, and before long, the pool became her new escape. She loved the velvety touch of the water to her skin, loved feeling that for an hour a day she was more than a broken doll or one grim prognosis after another. It was only in the water that the pain disappeared. Before she could walk without help again, before she could even dream about the ice, she found a way to move without constrains, to feel at home in her own body again.

By the time her physical therapy came to an end, Claire was addicted to swimming. Her therapist explained to her once that people tended to be drawn to the water because it was the most natural environment for them. It was the first memory human bodies had. It meant safety. It meant peace.

Claire liked that theory. If she closed her eyes and allowed the gravity to take her, sinking below the surface, she could never tell where up or down was. It made her think of being in outer space, suspended in zero gravity, floating weightless in a place where the sounds were muffled and world didn't look as sharp.

She pushed away from the board and took a perfect dive, slicing through the water in a wide arc despite the protest of her muscles, allowing it to envelop her body and push all thoughts out of her mind. She surged forward, kicking furiously with her feet and propelling herself straight ahead in the sea of air bubbles that clung to her arms and tickled her back. Her toes brushed against the tiled bottom before she angled her movement up and toward the surface again, breaking out with a gasp.

After ten laps, with her muscles burning and her lungs screaming for a proper inhale, she drifted off to the middle of the pool and flipped onto her back, her chest still heaving but the rest of her body pleasantly limp. It was still early, and if the place had a glass roof, she'd be able to see the stars.

She closed he eyes, marveling at the contrast between the cool touch of the water and her heated skin, waiting for her heartbeat to get back to normal and hoping her inner turmoil would sort itself out as well in the process. The uncomfortable tug in her knee started to melt away. Last night, she forgot that she was not a real girl anymore and threw herself recklessly into the one thing that made her feel grounded and in control until every inch of the ice beneath the blades of her skates was scarred and dented and she could no longer feel her legs.

Well, she was paying dearly for it today. And for what? It didn't change anything. It didn't help her regain her balance. If anything, pushing her limits only made everything worse because she kept looking at the goddamned door, waiting for it to open, but it never did.

It had been a while since she felt this fragmented, this scattered and all over the place, and it was making her antsy and restless, like she was about to jump out of her own skin.

If she tried hard enough, Claire could almost pretend it was about the new project she picked up at work, or the winter that was feeling particularly endless this year, and be done with it. If she tried hard enough, she could almost pretend it was not at all about the territorial glint in Owen's eyes on the night when Jason showed up at her place unannounced – the one that probably wasn't there because it _couldn't_ be there - that stirred something inside her. Something she didn't know how to put into words for ethical, moral, and logical reasons. And the worst thing was that it wasn't even the possibility of it that bothered her, but how much she wanted it to be real, and quite frankly, she had no idea how to feel about it.

She didn't even know his middle name.

Claire stayed afloat until she cooled down enough for her teeth to start chattering and her body to grow heavy as a stone, and for a brief moment she even panicked, worried that she would sink right to the bottom and never find it in her to come to the surface again…

She thought she'd be the first one in the office when she stepped out of the elevator half an hour later, her damp hair gathered into a sloppy twist, threatening her with an imminent pneumonia. Instead, she spotted Lowery messing with the coffee machine in their tiny kitchen at the end of the hallway while he hummed something under his breath.

He was not bald, like Karen stated, but his hairline was receding and the thick-rimmed glasses added another layer to his already established geekiness. He was wearing a superhero t-shirt today – Claire didn't recognize the characters but didn't dare ask because the last time she made that mistake, he dumper roughly 50-years' worth of history on her and she still hadn't recovered – that made her own stretched-out vintage sweater look rather sophisticated. Mr. Masrani was right not to push any dress code on them, she mused. They would wilt and die if he did.

Lowery noticed her out of the corner of his eye and looked up, giving Claire a small wave. She nodded her hello.

"What are you doing here so early?"

He emptied at least five packets of sugar into his black coffee and stirred them with enough enthusiasm to create a mini vortex in the cup. "Just finishing some updates," he shrugged with disinterest, then picked up his drink and followed Claire to her office. "Hey, Claire, some of us are going out for drinks tomorrow night. Wanna come?"

She set her bag onto her desk and shrugged out of her coat, leaving it draped over the back of her chair, then booted up her computer before crossing the room to open the blinds and let the first rays of the morning sun in, allowing them to paint the walls in yellow stripes. "Can't, sorry." She shook her head absently and pulled off the hair-tie, ruffling her hair with her fingers. "I have plans."

Lowery's eyebrows perked up over the rims of his glasses. "Do tell."

Claire ignored his curious look and the hunger for gossip in his eyes. They wee starved here, she knew it. Ever since Zara, a junior designer, dumped her boyfriend three weeks ago, there was nothing to talk about near the water cooler, but she was not going to save them at her expense. Instead, she leaned against her desk, making a mental note to de-clutter it and regarded Lowery thoughtfully.

"What would you give to a six-year old girl for her birthday?" She asked him and tilted her head to her shoulder, tapping her fingers on a stack of papers.

The question was more rhetorical than anything else. Still, Lowery took a gulp of his coffee and scrunched his face in concentration. "A Barbie?" He offered uncertainly.

Claire sighed.

This was not helpful.

xoox

If Owen knew that a handful of first- and second-graders could cause so much ruckus, he would probably pay more attention to buying earplugs instead looking for a perfect set of Disney-themed paper plates.

After having to reject the Space and Underwater Kingdom party ideas, for obvious reasons, and also because Owen knew there was no way he could pull them off on such a short notice, they finally settled on the Rainbow theme, which was a blessing, as far as he was concerned. Basically, everything had to be rainbow-colored – balloons and paper lanterns, banners, candles on the cake, party hats. Even Harper's overalls and leggings sported every colour of the spectrum. Granted, all of the parents in attendance were about to drop dead from this visual assault, but the kids found it delightful.

His mother helped him decorate the living room this morning while Harper was still asleep, allowing Owen to have a quick run to the bakery to pick up the cake he ordered a week ago – rainbow-layered, of course – and a handful of cupcakes so rich in food colouring he wondered if it was safer to gorge on a Chemistry Set instead.

This was so not how Jenny would have handled any of this, he thought as he fingers moved swiftly to tie the last of the balloons in the hallway and give everything a cursory look before the guests arrived. Jenny would have planned this in advance and probably thought of healthy snack alternatives, too. She would've made the Space theme possible. She wouldn't have _forgotten_ about Harper's birthday until two weeks ago when the girl casually reminded Owen about it, stressing the importance of inviting her friends. And Barry. And Claire.

He was ecstatic beyond himself that she wanted it at all – after the months of barely leaving her room, let alone the house, his kid wanted to _socialize_. With _people_. It was going to happen even if he had to tear the world apart and put it back together.

Except it was a goddamn nightmare and now Owen feared they might have to move after the party was over because there was no fucking way he would ever clean this place up and make it acceptable for living again. But Harper's smile was worth it, a million times over, even if the noise was giving him a raging headache.

"You're so lucky she didn't ask for karaoke," a father of one of the kids told him. Owen was. He really and truly was.

And they still were hours away from the cake part, which his mother told him usually signified the end of the event.

He was on the way to the bathroom to find a bottle of aspirin when someone rang the doorbell, and when Owen pulled it open, his first thought was – _Here it is, I've finally lost it_. Filling the whole doorway was a huge grey teddy bear, the one from cheesy greeting cards. And sure enough, it had a greeting card of its own sticking from under a giant pink bow tied around its neck.

"Man, is that you?" Owen heard Barry's muffled voice, and when he opened the door wider, the latter nearly fell into the hallway, having a hard time walking with the stuffed toy the size of a truck in his arms.

"Please tell me there's booze in there," Owen muttered, eyeing yet another present with a mixture of awe and disbelief – who on earth decided that the toys twice bigger than kids were a good idea? They might need to build a separate room for it – it sure as hell was not going to fit in Harper's.

"That fun, huh?" Barry smirked.

"You have no idea," Owen breathed out. The parents tried to be engaged, but after an hour or so, most of them started to look mildly shell-shocked from the noise, probably happy beyond themselves none of this was actually their concern. There was nothing Owen wanted more than to join them on the back porch, screw the cold. "Hey, Harper!" He called out instead, and the girl snapped her head up, her curls bouncing up and down her back. "Look who's here!"

Barry waved at her with a dazzling smile plastered on his face and she waved wildly back before going back to… whatever it was they were all doing there that, surprisingly, didn't involve shrieking or demolishing the house.

"This isn't so bad," Barry told him meanwhile, swiping the living room with a wide glance as he pulled off his jacket.

Earlier, Owen pushed most of the furniture to the walls to clear the space for Harper and her seven guests to play. There were snacks and an assortment of beverages of every color he could find on the table by the window, half-consumed by now, as well as a stack of all possible board games and drawing supplies he could think of to pull out of Harper's room, feverishly trying to remember if this always was such a hassle. Last year, Jenny was already sick, mere weeks away from her final trip to the hospital from which she never returned back home, so they had a quieter celebration, just the three of them, and before that… well, Owen couldn't remember it ever being this _much_.

A week ago, he hoped the weather would break at last, allowing him to kick the whole crowd into the backyard for a while. Instead, the storm that had hit them a few days ago effectively messed up that plan, and he suspected that doing so now would be a complete disaster, and maybe he didn't need them all to get sopping wet after a snowball fight or something of that kind.

"Wait till the sugar kicks in," he told Barry while his friend set the bear in the corner in the hallway, propping it against the staircase.

And then he nudged Owen in the ribs and jerked his chin toward a small gathering by the couch. "Who's that?"

Sitting cross-legged on the floor among the congregation of kids was Claire. She had an open bag of mini-marshmallows in front of her and a pack of toothpicks, and right now she was showing them all how to build things, connecting marshmallow to one another with said toothpicks. To him, it all mostly looked like elaborate molecule models that resembled the stuff one would find in a chemistry book, but whatever it really was they were doing, they all seemed to be finding it fascinating.

Her hair was tied loosely at the nape of her neck, a few strands brushing against her cheeks. And Owen had to make a physical effort to remind himself not to smile at the sight of her, patiently playing with his daughter and the other children, her bright red lips moving as she explained something or another to them, her voice too soft for him to catch what she was saying, but everyone seemed enthralled, and he couldn't blame them.

"That's Harper's ice-skating instructor," he responded with a nonchalant shrug, folding his arms over her chest. "I told ya, remember? My kid invited her to come."

" _That_ is her instructor?" Barry's jaw hit the floor, and he smacked Owen on the arm with the back of his hand. "Man... Wait, is that…" His eyes narrowed. "Is she…?"

Owen chuckled. "Yup. The one and only."

Another smack on the arm. "Man!" Barry shook his head.

Owen's phone let out a high-pitched shrill, a familiar caller ID blinking on the screen. "Harper," he called out again. "Come talk to Grandma Sylvia."

The girl leaped up from the floor and ran over to him, taking the phone from his hand and going to sit on the stairs to chat with Jenny's mother who lived in Michigan, dumping everything on her in one endless sentence that didn't require breathing – from the bright party hats and a seven-tier cake to the list of presents she received.

Claire rose to her feet as well. She brushed her palms to her grey slacks, smoothing out the creases, and then, after promising the adoring crowd to come back soon, she picked up an empty lemonade pitcher to refill it, carefully navigating her way across the minefield of discarded pieces of LEGO and colouring supplies.

"Oh, hey," she smiled at Owen when she saw him hovering in the doorway with a mildly panicked expression on his face, the same one that prompted her to take charge of the entertainment twenty minutes after she walked through the door and found him in a state close to shock. "We're good, really," she promised him and patted him on the shoulder. "A couple more hours, and they'll be too tired to cause any trouble."

"You don't have to do it," he told her quietly.

"I know. But it's fun. We're building a tower." And then her gaze shifted past his shoulder and fixed on Barry. "Hi."

"Oh, right." Owen introduced them quickly.

"Madame." Barry took her hand and brushed his lips to her knuckles.

"Enchantée," Claire replied, practically curtsying.

He arched his eyebrows. "Vous etes vraiment magnifique."

"Show off," Owen muttered, glaring at his friend as Claire squeezed past them with a giggle, heading for the kitchen. "The hell did you say to her?"

"None of your business," Barry snorted good-naturedly, and then turned to him. "I can't believe your daughter has a real-life Barbie." His eyes widened and his voice dropped. "You and her… right?" He hissed, pointing over his shoulder. " _Please_ tell me that you and her-"

Owen waved him off. "What? No, dude! Jesus, she's… I don't know, a friend. It's not like that."

Harper skipped over to them and tucked Owen's phone into the back pocket of his jeans before giving Barry a quick hug and running over to her guests, and Barry dropped his hands on Owen's shoulders, giving him a little shake. "Owen, my friend, you're crazy. Do something about it."

xoox

It was only in the late afternoon after the cake had been eaten, the presents opened, and everyone except Owen's mother headed home that he found Claire in the kitchen, pulling the cling wrap over the leftovers to put them in the fridge.

"Hey, there you are." He offered her a tired smile, feeling the weight lift off his shoulders, struck by how comforting her presence in his house felt. "Honestly, Claire, you don't have to bother with any of this," he gestured around with a wide swipe of his hand, already mentally prepared for the long night of cleaning the house.

She scoffed. "This is where you say thank you and let me finish."

"Thank you." He ran a weary hand down his face and leaned against the sink. "Was it obvious I've never done this before?"

"I thought you'd be hiding in a coat closet by the end of the first hour," she admitted and stuffed a plate of cupcakes into the fridge. A Tupperware container filled with mini sausage rolls followed suit.

"Damn, I didn't know it was an option." He rubbed his eyes, honestly wishing he'd thought of it sooner. "How'd you know about this kind of stuff?"

"Two nephews," she shuddered dramatically and moved to stand next to him. "And trust me, it's worse with the boys – they want to set everything on fire."

"Thanks for the warning," Owen hummed dryly.

"Don't worry," her eyes softened, "you'll get a hang of it. Probably by the time she'd rather die than have you anywhere near her friends, but still."

His laughter morphed into a desperate groan and he buried his face in his hands. "Wonderful."

Claire elbowed him lightly in the arm. "You did great. Harper loved it. The cake, the balloons, everything." The worry lines in the corners of his eyes smoothed out. "Your mom is very nice," she added nonchalantly, watching him squirm a little.

That was a very polite understatement, and he was painfully aware of the fact that Claire knew it.

Colleen Grady was a groupie. If he knew how comically his mother's eyes would pop out when she found out that 'a friend' he mentioned was not only a woman, but a local celebrity of sorts, he'd have a camera close at hand, if only because he knew for a fact that he would never surprise her like this again even if he spent the rest of his life trying. It would've been funny if it wasn't so embarrassing. He should have warned Claire, or his mother, or both of them. There was no way he was going to live it down.

"Whatever she said to you… it's not true," he told her solemnly, struggling not to laugh.

Claire's eyebrow quirked curiously. "Even the good stuff?"

"Especially the good stuff."

"Daddy," Harper appeared in the kitchen and scrambled up onto the bar-stool near the counter. "Look what Grandma gave me!" She thrust her hand at him, rolling her wrist to show him a silver charm bracelet with a few charms on it, glinting in the light of an overhead lamp. "Isn't it the prettiest?"

"It sure is!" He confirmed.

"And Claire didn't bring me anything." She turned expectantly to Claire.

"I didn't?" Claire pressed her hand to her chest, appalled.

Harper shook her head vigorously. "I checked _twice_!"

"Well, it's because my present is a surprise." Claire told her, leaning closer to the girl over the counter as her voice dropped conspiratorially.

Harper's face lit up and she also leaned forward. "What kind of surprise?"

"Your dad told me that you asked for a pony-"

"Please tell me there's no horse in my backyard," Owen muttered with unmasked terror in his voice. "Please tell me there's no-"

"There is no horse in your backyard," Claire told him and shook her head before turning back to his daughter. "But I would love to take _you_ ," she tapped the girl on the nose with her finger, "to the stables tomorrow and you could ride one as much as you want." And then added, "If that's okay with your father, of course."

They both turned to Owen.

"Daddy, please, can we go? Please, please, please?" Harper pleaded, practically holding her breath.

He looked between her and Claire for a long moment, putting an almost inhuman effort into keeping a straight face. "Can I come with?"

Harper shrieked and pressed her hands to her mouth before sliding off the stool and taking off on, "I gotta tell Grandma!"

"What?" Claire asked, straightening up when she saw him watch her like she'd just fell out of the sky and he couldn't believe what he was seeing. "You're scaring me now. Should I have asked first?" Her brows knitted together in concern, slight worry creeping into her voice. "I should've asked, haven't I? I'm sorry, Owen, I just really wanted it to be a surprise-"

"No, no!" He stopped her. "It's, ah…" Owen let out a long breath, and ruffled his hair with his hand, not sure how to put into words the magnitude of her gesture. "This is the most thoughtful thing anyone's ever done for Harper, or me. Or both of us, combined."

She relaxed minutely. "It's nothing, I assure you. I know someone…"

"Yes, it is, Claire." His voice lowered to a low, velvet husk that caused the goosebumps to spring along her skin. "It is."

She wanted to say something deep and profound, or better yet – laugh it off altogether, self-conscious under his gaze. Except his face was suddenly very close to hers, and she could smell chocolate cupcake on him and his cologne and man, and the world shrunk to the size of this kitchen. She heard him swallow, her own senses sharpened and amplified, and for a moment, Claire couldn't hear anything past the blood rush in her ears.

Owen's gaze dropped to her lips, and she tilted her face up—

Something fell and shattered in the living room, startling them. A concerned and then reassuring murmur followed, the voices low and the words indistinguishable. Claire turned away, causing Owen's mouth to brush briefly against hers, a feather-light touch that left her lips tingling with an electric undercurrent coursing beneath her skin.

"I should… go," she stepped away from him, jittery from a jolt of adrenaline.

"Yeah, and I should… check what they broke there," Owen nodded numbly and cleared his throat. "Claire…." _Say something. Something smart. Or funny. Anything_. _Say anything_. "Thanks for coming."

She nodded, too, and picked up her purse from the counter. "Thanks for the cake. And, Owen?" She paused, catching his eyes and holding his gaze. "About tomorrow…" His heart plummeted into his stomach. "You're driving."

xoox

Later that night, after he drove his mother home, almost successfully managing to avoid her questions, and loaded dishes into the dishwasher, after he removed party banners from the walls, took out the garbage, and returned the living-room furniture where it belong, after he helped Harper haul her presents into her room and then tucked his daughter into bed, the excitement of the day finally catching up with her, Owen collapsed onto the couch and finally allowed himself to breathe out a sigh of relief.

This day was officially over, and he was so drained his brain hurt.

There was a wedding photo of him and Jenny sitting on the dresser in the bedroom, and he couldn't bring himself to step into the room. Normally, seeing it a few times a day felt like a relief, if a bittersweet one. Like it was a testament to her presence in his life. But after what happened between him and Claire earlier, he couldn't bear the idea of facing it, his thoughts a jumbled mess he wasn't sure how to deal with, or even where to start.

He almost kissed another woman today. The woman who loved his daughter. The one whose smile was like magic. The one he knew he would have kissed if they weren't interrupted.

The one who wasn't his wife.

Owen let out a long breath and ran his palm over his jaw, his stubble catching on his wedding ring and giving him a start, and all of a sudden, it felt too tight on his hand, squeezing the life out of him. He twisted it around his finger, and the sensation was gone.

"So," he dropped his head back and stared at the ceiling lined with shadows from the reading lamp in the corner, "now what?"

 **To be continued...**

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 **A/N:** I hope you're having as much fun as I do! Reviews are much appreciated - please let me know what you think!


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's note:** Okay, bad news - this story will probably be loner than expected. I'm editing the last part now and it might require a few additional scenes, so... be warned! Also, thank you so much for the lovely response - we're finally getting to the fun parts, and yes, AUs are tough, but this one is a delight to play with, and I'm glad you're enjoying it!

* * *

The day was cold and sunny, the sky bright-blue over their heads when Owen turned his car off the highway and headed south toward the lazy hills rolling in the distance, standing in stark contrast to the flat landscape, and a handful of low structures scattered before them – a small ranch surrounded by dark shapes of the still-bare trees.

Claire's friend from college, as she had explained to Owen, was running a training program there and kept a couple of his own horses in the stables. He was not working on Sundays, but they were to mention his name to whoever was around today to get a tour and some horseback time for Harper. The girl was giddy with delight, her face pressed to the cool glass, peering out with anxious anticipation at the vast expanse of empty fields on either side of the road.

She'd been up since dawn, Owen told Claire when they picked her up half an hour ago, bouncing off the walls for hours even though she knew they were not leaving before 11 and asking him one question after another despite the fact that he knew about as much as she did. It had been so long since the last time she was this enthusiastic about anything Owen was scared to joke about it up for fear of jinxing it and chasing it away, but he sort of guessed Claire knew it already, his daughter's excitement palpable and quite infectious, too, filling the space and the pauses between them.

Filled with odd, buzzing energy, Owen kept darting quick sideways looks at Claire, sitting in the passenger seat next to him, her coat unbuttoned and her scarf loosened in the warmth of his car. But their eye contact was fleeting, her attention focused primarily on his daughter, and after a while he started to question whether the small moment in his kitchen happened at all. It was rather tempting to chalk it up to his wishful thinking, or a case of temporary insanity, and for a moment, Owen wanted desperately to jump at the opportunity to do just that. Except it was pretty damn hard to erase the memory of her face so close to his he could feel the warmth of her skin, and the light touch of her mouth to his.

However, if it bothered Claire at all, he could see no sign of it, and by the time they reached their destination, Owen decided to go along with the whole 'ignoring the elephant in the room' plan and act like nothing had changed, if that was what she was doing. Not that anything did, he reminded himself. Certainly not that pang of guilt that would jolt through him whenever he'd catch himself wanting more from his life than he already had.

There was no need to make anything unnecessarily awkward. Well, more awkward than it already was.

Owen whistled quietly under his breath when he turned off the paved road and onto the gravel one, splattered with patches of snow, leading toward the main entrance.

The whole complex was neat and impressive – freshly painted barns and stables, busy on the weekend even despite the chilly weather, and a farmhouse in the back that, according to Claire, housed an office, a vet station, and living quarters for the live-in grooms and guests staying overnight.

In the distance, five bay and black horses roamed lazily around the pasture, ankle-deep in the melting snow, while to the left from them, a teenage girl trotted on a white mare around one of the equestrian arenas, her eyes narrowed against the glare of the afternoon sun. Owen and Harper walked over to it to watch her do basic jumps and practice a fancy-looking prance while Claire talked to a young man in practical knee-high boots and thick jacket covered with dust about their arrangements.

The air smelled faintly of soil, hay, and manure – not an unpleasant combination, albeit an unfamiliar one, that stirred something akin genetic memory in him. A recollection sewn into his DNA. Harper promptly climbed onto the fence, clutching the wood railing tightly with her hands, mesmerized by the dance of the white horse whose mane rippled like waves of the sea in the wind.

"Whatcha think, kiddo?" Owen asked her.

"Can I have one?" She whispered without tearing her gaze away from the girl and the mare.

"Not so fast," he huffed good-naturedly, and then pried her off the fence when he saw Claire waving at them, motioning for them to come over. "Let's see what else they've got, how 'bout that?"

From her perch on Owen's hip, Harper was more than eager to pet a few animals as the three of them took a walk around the farm, stroking their noses and long, soft manes, giggling when they'd snort and sniff at her, probably looking for a treat. However, for her own first experience, she chose a stocky dun pony named Chester with long grey bangs hanging over his eyes, somewhat cautious around the bigger beasts that looked gigantic up close.

"You know this means the world to her, don't you?" Owen asked Claire as they watched a young groom lead the pony around another outdoor arena with Harper on his back, her hands clasped rightly around the saddle and reigns, her face pinched in concentration.

Leaning against the fence, Claire smiled softly without turning to him, her eyes following the girl. "It's fun for me, too. The most exciting thing that happened in my life in the past 10 years was battling my mild addiction to painkillers, so this," she gestured vaguely around them, "is not a bad change of scenery."

Almost on instinct, Owen looked down at her jeans-clad legs. "Which one was it? Left or right?" He asked.

"Left."

He nodded. "Does it still hurt?"

She glanced at him quickly and offered him a half-shrug. "Sometimes. If I overwork it." Then added, "It's not that bad now. For several years I couldn't even fly because I had a titanium implant there that would send metal detectors at the airport into a cardiac arrest. That was… interesting."

"So, you were basically a cyborg?" Owen clarified, also propping his forearms on the fence next to her, making the old wood creak.

Claire laughed, her eyes crinkling, and shook her head. "Where were you, Mr. Grady, when I needed that kind of pep talk?"

"Hm, when was it, 13-14 years ago?" His forehead creased. "Yup, I was shamelessly hitting on my French Lip prof."

"You?" She eyed him with disbelief. " _You_ took French Lit class?"

"Hey," he nudged her with his elbow, all righteous indignation, "I have multitudes, too." A pause. "Besides, it sorta wasn't a choice. I mean, I thought it would be an easy credit."

"Was it?" Claire inquired, still chocking on muffled snorts.

He laughed and admitted, "The toughest shit you can imagine."

Before them, the groom explained something to Harper, showing her how to position her grip on the reigns and what to do with her feet and legs, and then he ran over to the opposite side of the arena, waving at the girl to stir the pony toward him. Slowly, Harper squeezed Chester's sides, tugging at the reigns until he moved where she wanted him to go, her delight so radiant it threatened to lure early spring out of its hiding.

"She really does like it," Claire noted, watching the girl navigate her way around the arena, the pony playful beneath her and eager to follow her commands. "I'll never forgive myself if she ditches my classes for this," she added half-jokingly.

"Doubt it." Owen said quietly, his gaze shifting from his daughter to the woman beside him.

She was squinting just a little against the wind, her freckles pale after the long months of little to no sun exposure, her lips parted ever so slightly, curved at the corners without Claire's knowing it. His heart did a flip, then climbed all the way up to his throat and plunged down into his stomach as an invisible hand squeezed his lungs, rendering him breathless and dizzy and so goddamn terrified he thought he'd black out. Which, admittedly, would make a nice exit.

"Um, you've got…" He started.

"Mm?" Claire turned to him just as he reached to brush a strand of hair from her face and tuck it behind her ear, his fingers lingering on her cheek and making her skin burn. His face was barely half an inch away from hers – when did this happen? – while their exhales were puffing out in small white clouds that they pushed between each other. His eyes darkened and he swallowed, his Adam's Apple bobbing in his throat as his index finger slipped under her chin, his gaze shifting down to her mouth—

"Daddy!" They jerked away from one another at the sound of Harper's voice, Claire's cheeks hot and her breathing shallow. "Look, I'm doing it all by myself!" She waved at him, making her second circle without any assistance from the groom.

Owen smiled and nodded, telling her to keep it up. When Claire moved a step away from him, he chose to pretend he didn't notice.

On the way back to town, they stopped for a late lunch – or early dinner – at the 50's-styled diner just outside of the city limits, bustling with other patrons on their way back home after the weekend away. The three of them took a booth by the window closer to the back, and between the slurps of her milkshake and shoving French fries into her mouth, Harper recounted everything she'd seen and done this afternoon, alternating this flow with occasional reminder to Owen that having her own pony would be 'so awesome'.

"How about you keep your room clean for one week, and then we'll talk?" Owen suggested, eyebrows raised. Harper's face fell in defiance instantly, and Claire dove behind her mug of hot chocolate to hide her stifled laughter.

He listened with half an ear, nodding at all the right moments, his own burger hardly touched, as he tried to decide what bothered him more – the fact that Claire would barely look at him or that he had no idea what to say if she did do it. Screwing up twice in two days was somewhat excessive even for him, and something told him that looking the other way twice in row was not an option. Alas, she was focused entirely on his daughter instead, absently tearing pieces off her own turkey sandwich and reminding Harper to _breathe_ as she spoke.

When they dropped Claire off at her house, she slipped out of the car after waving a halfhearted goodbye to Owen and pulled the back door open. "So, you had fun?" She asked Harper, her head tilted quizzically.

"Thank you!" The girl pulled her into a tight hug. "The bestest present ever," she whispered into Claire's hair, and Claire squeezed her back, brushing a quick kiss to the top of Harper's head.

"You're welcome."

"Don't move," Owen instructed his daughter when Claire started toward her door and hopped out into the cold evening, following her up the narrow path. "Claire."

She paused, her hand already on the doorknob, her expression puzzled. For a brief moment, her gaze flickered toward the car. "Did I forget something?"

"No…" He hopped up her porch steps two at a time. "I don't think so." Winded more from accelerated heartbeat than a 5-second jog, he stopped in front of her, feeling as confused as she looked, his mind empty. "Look, about earlier-" he started and faltered.

"Nothing happened," she said quietly, never breaking the eye contact.

"I know," Owen added quickly. "And it's not that I don't want it to." He paused, watching her. From this close, he could _feel_ her, the warmth radiating off of her practically tangible, the green of her eyes pulling him in like gravity. "Because I do, Claire. God help me, I do." His voice dropped, sounding hoarse somehow, his whole body humming with deep, needy longing. "But it's too fast, too soon. And Harper… She's really attached to you and if something doesn't—I'm sorry."

This was meant to be an entirely different conversation if he hadn't talked himself out of it two minutes ago when his guilt kicked in, rendering him paralyzed on the inside. What a moron.

Claire's lips quirked faintly but the smile never came. "I know. It's okay, you don't have to apologize."

"Okay," he echoed, not sure what else to say. Not sure if there even was anything he could say.

She pushed the door open. "Thank you for today. I'll see you later, Owen."

xoox

Owen had yet to figure out why some days felt like the whole world belong to him while the others made him wonder if it was falling apart before his eyes. And while the moments of crisis were growing few and far between, he couldn't help but feel sometime that the entire universe was conspiring against him. Granted, there was no other way to look at it after burning his mouth on his coffee and then promptly spilling said coffee down his shirt, remembering that he definitely needed to take care of their laundry before they ran out of clean clothes altogether.

It did not qualify as a good morning.

"Harper!" Owen bellowed down the hall for the third time. They were going to be late. Hell, they were late 10 minutes ago.

"I can't find my bracelet," she said without looking up when he appeared in the doorway of her room to find her kneeling near her dresser, rummaging through one of the drawers.

Owen ran a hand over his face. "Okay, you'll have to do without it today then."

The girl pushed away from the dresser and dove under her desk. "I can't go without it," she said with a frown. "Grandma gave it to me!"

He stifled an exasperated sigh. Checked his watch and pursed his lips into a thin line, the crease between his eyebrows deepening. "Harper, come on, we have to go."

"I have to find it," she repeated stubbornly, her voice breaking. "I can't go without it."

"You can and we need to be out the door in two minutes," he countered, which came out snappier than Owen intended.

The girl looked up at him, "Why does everything always have to be your way?"

"Because I say so, that's why," Owen pointed out, feeling like he was starting to lose his patience.

In looks, Harper took largely after her mother – the same curve of her eyebrows, the same slightly upturned nose, the same dark curls, falling nearly to her waist. There was an old photo album with Jenny's childhood photos that Owen kept in the study and if he put Harper's picture next to her mother's when she was her age, they could easily be mistaken for the same person, or twins.

The girl's stubbornness was all Owen's, though. She would never leave the house wearing blue sneakers if her heart was set on the red ones, or wear pigtails on a ponytail day, or eat her vegetables if she didn't feel like it. He had yet to discover a force of nature that could make his daughter do what she didn't want to do. It was cute when she was little, and one day, he hoped, she would put this trait to good use, but right now it was getting more and more frustrating the older she got, their communication calling for negotiating and compromising, and Owen was starting to suspect that her teenage years would be a nightmare for both of them.

A part of him loved that willfulness in Harper, the determination that pushed her to learn how to walk and read before her peers did, but it also made her withdraw into herself in any situation that was out of her control. This was why she took the loss of her mother so hard – like she was trying to will herself into growing up faster so she could have a better grasp on something that was yet outside of her full comprehension. He admired her for that, however wistful that admiration was – at times, Owen couldn't help but think that she was stronger than he'd ever be.

Which was wonderful, all things considered, except they really didn't have any time for this right now.

Harper's eyes welled up when she looked up at him. "Why are you so mean?" Her lips began to quiver, and her breaking voice stabbed him right in the heart.

"Harper…" Owen took in a deep breath. "Okay, let's look for it."

"Go away!" Angry tears sprung out of her eyes, and she sank onto her bed and gave that knife a twist. "I don't want you, I want my mommy!"

He exhaled sharply, feeling sick to his stomach.

She wasn't that far off – if he was in Harper's place, he'd also want just about anyone else who was more qualified to do the job. He was a joke, and he kept messing everything up. They were constantly late, he was forgetting stuff, mixing up the dates. Half the time, he had no idea what he was doing, and the other half he still wasn't sure he was getting it right. Owen was trying, but he couldn't help but wonder if it was enough to justify all the mistakes he kept making along the way.

It had been over ten months now, and while they made some progress with their routine, he still felt like a fraud, their lives feeling more like a game, something he could step out of to take a breath and regroup. Particularly, on the moments like this one. A part of him was still clinging to the hope of finding the middle ground, figuring out the balance between having to be two parents at the same time, but even that hope was starting to fade, filling him with dread of being stuck in this uncharted territory for the rest of his life. It was like he couldn't figure out the right steps, or sometimes the steps were right, but the music had changed.

Owen crouched in front of Harper and reached for his daughter whose shoulders were shaking with quiet sobs, bracing himself for being pushed away, and if she did it, he knew he wouldn't blame her. However, she leaned into him and pressed her face into his shoulder, her tears soaking Owen's shirt and her small body trembling.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart," Owen rubbed Harper's back gently. "I miss you mom, too. Very, very much. But we have to make it work without her, baby. As a team, remember?" Maybe if he repeated it enough times, he'd learn to believe it.

The girl nodded and wrapped her arms around him, her ragged breathing evening out slowly. "Okay." She sniffled. "Daddy? Are you going to get sick and die to?" She asked quietly.

"What?" Owen pulled back and wiped away the tears from her cheeks, his forehead creased as he searched her features, his chest tightening at the sight of tired acceptance on her face. "No, honey. Where did you get that?"

She rolled her shoulders in a half-shrug. Her hands dropped in her lap, fingers bunching the fabric of her purple tutu.

"Hey," Owen tapped her on the chin until Harper was looking at him again. "Never, I swear." He pulled at her hands until she let go of the starchy fabric – a nervous habit she picked up from Jenny – and clasped them in his palms, their eyes locked together. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Promise?" Harper's eyes narrowed assertively in a cautious hope that she didn't trust herself with just yet.

He willed himself to offer her a smile, hoping it looked more reassuring than it felt. "Cross my heart."

At last, the worry lines on her face smoothed out, and she nodded slowly. And then asked, "Can we stay at home and watch cartoons today?"

Owen gave her a look - one eyebrow arched in a silent, _Do you need to ask?_ Harper wrinkled her nose – there was no point in arguing, and they both knew it.

He uncurled from the floor and stood up, and Harper slid off the bed and followed him into the hallway, this time without protest.

Two minutes later, they found her bracelet in the pocket of her coat where she put it the previous evening.

Another thing that Owen discovered after finally dropping his daughter off at school (only 20 minutes late for her first period) was a black cashmere glove wedged between the passenger seat and the center console. He pulled it out and twisted it in his fingers. The fabric was pleasantly soft to the touch, smelling faintly of Claire's perfume.

xoox

"I'm just saying – he's a good guy," Karen pressed for what felt like a hundredth time.

"I don't need you setting me up with anyone," Claire countered with patient tat threated to turn into exasperation any moment now and blew a wisp of hair that kept falling over her forehead off with a huff. "And why would you want to do it, anyway?"

A hand of her hip, Karen regarded her glumly across the room. "My love life is dead in a ditch, Claire. Let me live vicariously through you."

"Well, thank you, but no, thank you," Claire snorted. "I can take care of _my_ love life without your help."

"Right," Karen snorted, earning an expressive eye-roll from her sister.

After the divorce, she decided to redecorate the house in an attempt to try and erase the presence of her ex-husband from her life to the best of her ability. After living for nearly twenty years surrounded by everything beige and pastel, Karen settled on baby-blue for the living room and mint-green for the kitchen. The hallway was still under consideration.

Currently, she and Claire were halfway into repainting her living room while her sons, Zach and Gray, were sent to clean the garage, the sound of their bickering wafting through the vents as they pushed around the boxes of useless junk no one had the heart to throw out. Claire knew for a fact that they were not likely to make any progress there whatsoever, but at least it kept them out of the way.

However, ending up elbows deep in paint and redecoration supplies was hardly what Claire expected when her sister asked her to 'come over and help out with something' on her day off. Apparently, there were two types of people in the world – those who hired professionals for this kind of thing, and those who shamelessly exploited their family.

"You _are_ a professional," Karen pointed out when Claire brought it up. "And you're free."

"Wow, I've never felt more appreciate in my life." She deadpanned.

Claire's phone _dinged_ , announcing a new text message.

The corner of her mouth curled up at the sight of Owen's name that popped up on the screen.

 _Lost anything?_ it read.

 _Are we playing 20 questions?_ She typed back. _Should I ask if it's an animal, a vegetable, or a mineral?_

Owen responded promptly, _Found your glove_.

Claire bit her lip, doing her best to ignore Karen who was making big eyes at her. _Thank god, I thought it ran away from me._

The screen came to life almost immediately. _Well then, it's grounded until you're reunited_.

 _Are you up for the challenge? You saw what it's capable of_. She shook her head, trying not to notice a fluttering in her chest and a soft warm glow in the pit of her stomach.

 _I have a 6-yr old who's learning how to make waffles from scratch. I can handle a runaway glove._

 _You're a brave man_.

Instead of sending another text, Owen called, a picture of him and Harper that Claire took at the girl's birthday party blinking on the screen – Owen grinning for what he was worth, slightly blurry next to his daughter who was blowing out birthday candles, her party hat slightly askew.

" _Hey, um…_ _You need me to bring it over?_ " Owen asked when she picked up, his voice laced with amusement, and maybe it was the paint fumes, but she almost managed to convince herself that she could no longer hear the notes of tension that seemed to permeate every conversation they had since last Sunday. All one and half of them, and every word they'd exchanged felt like trying too hard.

"No, it's okay. Believe it or not, I have more than one pair of gloves, Mr. Grady," she responded.

He chuckled, and Claire imagined him standing in his kitchen bathed in the morning sunlight tangled in his hair, making it look golden at the ends. Imaged him leaning against the counter with the easy grace he was seemingly unaware of, his cheeks shaded with stubble, probably still sporting a bedhead.

" _Yeah, well_ … _I was just worried about your mutual separation anxiety. Wouldn't want that to happen_."

Claire snorted. "We'll live." A pause. "So, waffles, huh?" She could hear the clatter of pots and pans on his end of the line, and Harper's voice reading from a cookbook or maybe a magazine.

" _Stranger things happen_."

They do indeed, she thought.

Like a snowfall in the Sahara Desert.

Or Venus spinning backwards for no particular reason.

Or the fact that practical and level-headed Claire Dearing was grinning uncontrollably like an idiot right now while her logical thinking and pragmatism were having a laughing fit. With a suddenness that left her lightheaded, Claire's life was spiraling out of control, making her feel like she was balancing on a tightrope – one wrong step, and she'd be flying into the abyss. The only difference between this and a circus trick was that she was blindfolded as well, or at least so it seemed.

God, she was in so much trouble.

"Who was that?" Karen asked as soon as Claire hung up.

"No one." Claire grabbed her abandoned roller and dipped it into a tray of baby-blue paint, grateful for an excuse to focus on something that wasn't dealing with the flopping of her heart in her chest. It grew five size too big and couldn't fit in her ribcage anymore, making her slightly dizzy.

"Could you be any more obvious?" Karen rolled her eyes. "What's going on with you two?"

Claire turned away, choosing to concentrate on the task at hand. "I have no idea what you're talking about, sis."

Karen snorted. "Wanna try that again, but with more feeling?"

xoox

There was something soothing about repetitive activities that Owen found particularly comforting. Some people meditated, other knitted, and he loved to run. The simple action of pounding the pavement, one step after another, pushing himself forward helped him clear his mind, set his thoughts straight, or, in most cases, rid him of any altogether. Funny how physical exertion could be so consuming it barely ever left the space for anything else.

A few days after Jenny's funeral, he woke up completely numb, his mind a black hole, which felt surprisingly refreshing after a long period of agonizing pain over the sickness and the loss of his wife. It was almost like his brain blocked out the whole incident, making Owen believe half the time that Jenny would be in the kitchen or watching cartoons with Harper when he got back home from work. Something like coping mechanism – he was well familiar with the concept in theory after those mandatory therapy sessions that followed one of his NAVY tours.

It was easier that way, too. He could function the way he used to. He could get up in the morning and make breakfast for his daughter and go to work and pick up groceries on his way back. He'd probably lie to himself if he said he wanted it to be any other way. Frozen somehow. Stunned.

It didn't matter.

At the time, nothing mattered. The woman he loved more than life itself was gone, his whole existence was in ruins – why would he _want_ to feel anything about any of this? A few months ago, he was certain this was how it was going to be until the day he died – going through motions as if on autopilot, sticking to the basics of existence rather than actually living, holding on to the sweet oblivion of dreams that made sense more than his reality.

Not only did it feel better than the alternative, it felt fair. What _right_ did he have to be happy when Jenny was dead? How could he allow himself a sliver of hope for the future when hers was taken from her? He had a clear plan and goal ahead of him – make sure his daughter's life was better than this. End of story.

And then…

And then he started to thaw, the feelings he never knew he could have again peeking cautiously from their hiding, waking up from a long slumber, shaky and uncertain but eager and willing to overflow him. Of course, he fought them as best he could, shoving them back and burying them deep and shutting them out with persistence and determination. The anticipation of something new and wonderful mixed with guilt and shame, Jenny's face before his mind's eye, sobering and grave.

Until the edges of that image began to blur and it cracked and faded like an old photograph, and the heavy black mane Jenny used to wear in sloppy buns on the top of her head and the chocolate softness of her gaze stepped back, giving way to bright-red waves and a dusting of freckles and the sea-green of Claire's eyes, the sound of her laughter echoing in his head. Until he was going to bed and waking up with her face before his mind's eye.

In the past decade, Owen Grady had seen enough death, blood and violence to last him a few lifetimes. He'd long lost count of the times when he was half a step away from becoming a memory and never seeing the light of another day again. And yet, it was nothing compared to the animal fear that was clutching him in its sharp claws right now. The fear of taking a leap again and betting on a _maybe_ instead of sticking to a safe _no_.

Of course, there also was a matter of Harper. Did he have any right to bring another woman into their lives when the memories of her mother were still raw and fresh in his daughter's mind? No, he did not. It already frightened Owen that she was young, her recollection of Jenny more fleeting than his. In a few years, she would barely remember her at all, the face on the photographs would be a face of a stranger. Was he in a position to speed up this process by bringing another person into their small world after trying so hard and for so long to conserve it the way it had been when the three of them were still together?

But how on earth was he supposed to choose between logic and common sense, and the fact that he was head over heels for Claire?

Owen circled around the park, before slowing down and stopping eventually, breathless. He bent over, hands propped on his knees, gulping hungry for air, his lungs screaming. For once, a 12-mile run left him more agitated than he was when he left the house.

That evening Owen found Harper sitting at the coffee table in the living room after dinner, her school workbook open before her and her crayons strewn all over the place.

"Hey, kiddo? Whatcha you up to?"

"Spelling," she said when he plopped down next to her.

"Sound like fun," Owen offered enthusiastically, stretching out on the carpet, but she only shrugged. Then her expression brightened and she peered down at him. "Can we go see the horses again?"

Owen chuckled. "We might have to ask Claire about that." He made another attempt to gather his thoughts together. Took a steadying. "Hey, can I ask you something?"

"Sure." The girl reached for a blue crayon and filled the large boxes with shaky P-H-O-N-E.

"What'd you say if Claire started hanging out with us sometimes?" He watched her look for another crayon before diving under the coffee table to retrieve it.

"She's already hanging out with us," Harper responded, seemingly more interested in her homework.

Owen cleared his throat. "Maybe more than that," he said. "Like, maybe we'll have her over for dinner now and then, or take her to the movies with us, or to the park. Stuff like that. Hypothetically speaking."

She turned to him with a frown. "What's a ' _hypoticly'_?"

" _Hypothetically_. It means 'in theory'," he explained. "Maybe she will, maybe she won't. But if she will, would it be okay with you?"

Harper sat back on her heels. "Why won't she? She likes us."

He laughed at that. "You think so? Well, I still have to ask her."

"It's okay." The girl grinned. "Hypo—what was it?"

"Hypothetically." With a victorious whoop, Owen pulled her down for a vicious tickle attack.

xoox

"Stop it, man!" Barry demanded from his spot near the workbench where he was scrubbing his hands clean with a solvent the following Friday, its sharp scent hanging in the air.

Elbows deep in the guts of an old Harley Davidson, Owen glanced up at him. "What?"

"You're humming," Barry raised his eyebrows. "Why are you humming?"

"I'm not humming," Owen scoffed.

"You are, too. What is it? Did your daughter get an A or something?" He paused theatrically. "Or is it that hot -"

"Shut up," Owen told him, his mouth curving into a smile against his will.

"'Cause if you're not gonna go for it, I might," Barry warned him, earning a dirty cloth in his face, tossed with surprising precision.

"You need to get a life," Owen said, pulling away from the motorcycle and standing up, his hands shaking with the nervous energy coursing through him.

"Hey, where are you going?" Barry called after him when he grabbed his jacket and headed for the exit.

"I got a date," Owen tossed over the shoulder with a short laugh, his insides churning at the sound of his own voice and the idea of… whatever it was he was going to do.

xoox

It was a little known fact, but her entire life could have easily turned out entirely different.

The first time Claire stepped on the ice, she was 4, and up until this moment, she was living and breathing her dreams about bright, colourful leotards and tight buns and doing gymnastics, like Karen. Yet, when their parents went to sign her up for the lessons, the class was already full, leaving Claire devastated and heart-broken. Her only option was to wait for the next year, or maybe hope that someone would drop out, vacating a spot she could take.

Her mother suggested trying ice-skating to fill the time until Claire could join the next group, and the offer wasn't met with enthusiasm. Why would she want to do it if it wasn't gymnastics? But Claire didn't have much of a choice except to maybe sulk in her room and fell miserable, and at the time, she really, really wanted to have _a thing_ , like her sister. And after her first hour on the skating rink, she never thought about gymnastics ever again.

Push, turn, jump…

Triple flip, her lifelong nemesis.

Claire winced at the mild tug of ache in her leg, caused by an awkward landing. It was all about the setting - knowing what she had to do and seeing it in her mind wasn't enough. Her body needed to be aligned perfectly and positioned properly for every move. She knew from experience how doing it wrong might end.

All her life, she heard people tell her that her techniques looked effortless and smooth and flawless, not one of them seemingly realizing that there was always fear. The ice was merciless if she allowed it to be, yet it also gave her the freedom like nothing else, and the short moments in the air, mere seconds of floating above the smooth, pale surface were worth it. They were worth every bruise and scratch and all of her tears. There was, after all, nothing quite like flying, like an illusion of breaking the laws of physics and tearing off the ground, escaping the grip of gravity at last, longing for more than she could have.

And at the same time, it kept her grounded and focused, her attention zeroed in on here and now. More whole than ever.

Spin, lunge…

"You really are living here, aren't you?"

A familiar voice broke through the melodic notes of _Across The Universe,_ nearly throwing her off balance – both literally and figuratively.

Claire whipped her head around, so engrossed in the moment she thought she might have imagined it. It had been so long since Owen casually dropped by when she wasn't teaching, she'd forgot to look for him in the bleachers, hidden in the shadows outside the brightly lit arena – a habit she developed briefly after the first few time he'd done it. The one she wasn't particularly proud of.

She straightened up and pushed the hair that escaped the scrunchie holding it together at the nape of her neck out of her face. "Actually, I am. I sleep on the pallet over there," she motioned vaguely toward the corner of the auditorium. "And my house is just a decoy to keep my sister off my back."

He chuckled. "Why am I not surprised?"

"What brings you by, Mr. Grady?" She asked, only half-joking.

In the two weeks since Harper's birthday, Owen made a point of having as little interaction with her as humanly possible. No, he wasn't rubbing it in her face, but his attempts were undeniable nonetheless. He'd drop Harper off and collect her afterward, not a minute late, always ushering the girl out the second the pulled on her street shoes and avoiding looking at Claire for more than a second at a time like she was contagious with something incurable.

As a result, Claire went out of her way to stick around talking to the other kids or their parents until Owen and Harper were gone, desperate to prove that two could play that game. Which only added to her puzzlement that she was seeing him now, not only here out of the blue, but stepping onto the ice, grey ice-skates on his feet. He clutched the barrier for a second to steady himself, stiff and cautious, and her eyebrows hit the roof at the sight of him.

And then he started toward her, not at all uncertain in his movements – something that undoubtedly came from practice.

"Colour me surprised," Claire whistled under her breath, and Owen laughed, the sound bouncing off the walls to hang for a moment in the hollow space above their heads.

"I actually played hockey," he admitted. "A long time ago."

She arched an eyebrow, allowing him to slide closer to her, trying to guess what was it that caught her attention. In a snug leather jacket and black dress shirt underneath it, he looked different somehow, but she couldn't quite place her finger on what made her think so. Not his wardrobe choices, she decided in the end. She saw him dressed in grease-stained work clothes as well as in casual and what Owen perceived as 'business casual' attire before.

No, there was something about _him_ this time…

"And then what happened?" She asked, genuinely curious.

"Middle school. Puberty." He flinched at the memories. "I stopped being interested in hangin' out with people that looked like me and got into spending time with people who looked like you." His gaze traveled up and down Claire's body, and she raised her chin, her eyes glinting with amusement.

"But girls like jocks," she pointed out.

"Yeah, and they also like having boyfriends who don't spend 4 hours a day chasing a plastic puck," Owen countered.

"Fair enough." She raised her hands, conceding his point. "So…" In one fluid motion, she slipped away and around him, disappearing in the shadow for a second only to emerge in another spotlight, "do you have any other hidden talents I know nothing about?"

Owen pushed back, making a slow semi-circle on the spot, following her with his gaze.

"Sometime I don't burn the food to a crisp when I cook," he responded, watching her face.

A laughter bubbled up in Claire's chest. "Wow, you're quite a catch," she started, and then cut herself off with a wince. "Sorry, I didn't mean it like—It's all Karen's fault."

"Karen thinks I'm a catch?" Owen specified, making an awkward spin as if to prove a point.

"No! I mean, yes, obviously-" Claire rolled her eyes, "-but it's not what it was about." She shook her head, trying not to think of the traitorous colour rising up her cheeks. "My sister got divorced recently and she hates when people treat her like a divorced woman instead of like, you know, a person. And I guess I thought you'd also be sick of being defined by something that happened _to_ you instead of who you are." After that, she clamped her mouth shut, hoping that one of the overhead lights would maybe fall on her head this very moment. "I'm going to stop talking now."

Owen stayed quiet for a long moment, before his lips stretched into a rueful half-smile and he rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. "You know, I've heard 'I'm sorry, my condolences' so many times in this past year that at some point I almost started to believe it was my name. I actually almost introduced myself as 'I'm sorry, my condolences' when I first met you."

"Shame." She bit her lip when Owen nearly tripped over himself, trying to keep up with her. "That'd make one hell of a first impression."

Claire didn't really notice she was skating away from him while Owen was advancing on her until her sacrum bumped into the barrier, catching her off-guard, and the next moment, he was right in front of her, bracketing her with his arms, his hands gripping the railing on other side of Claire for support. And they were both breathless, and she could feel the pounding of his heart against her chest and his warm breath on her face, and the world was spinning so fast.

"Why are you here, Owen?" Claire repeated softly.

His eyes were deep blue and stormy, making her think of being lost in the sea, and drowning, drowning, drowning.

"Trying to not be defined by something that happened _to_ me," he murmured, his face so close to Claire's he could see every golden spec in her eyes, every freckle, every smallest detail already seared into his mind. His nose bumped against hers, his lips hovering over Claire's for a second before she tilted her face up, pressing her mouth to his, her fingers curled tightly around his jacket.

She smelled of something sweet and tasted of cherries – a mix that left him lightheaded, her lips soft and warm against his. And when she started to pull away, Owen dipped his head, deepening the kiss, his teeth tugging lightly at her bottom lip, his heart suddenly too big for his body, and too hot, and too full…

"So I was hoping," he began when Claire drew back a little at last, "to maybe take you out for dinner. If you happen to have a couple hours on your hands."

"I think I could shift some things around," she whispered, her head swimming. "But what about-"

"It's okay," he promised her as his shuddered inhale reverberating through her, no longer able to hold back the words he'd been swallowing for quite a while. "I can't get you out of my mind for one goddamn moment, Claire. Couldn't for months now, and it's driving me insane."

"And Harper…" Her hand traced the collar of his shirt, his skin rippling and shivering under the touch of her cool fingers.

"Harper's staying with my mother till tomorrow."

Feeling her face break into a grin, Claire wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling herself up urgently on tiptoes and closer to him, dizzy and elated. "Tomorrow, huh?" Her lips crashed to his again as Owen's hand slipped up her back, a guttural moan forming in the back of his throat, and she prayed to god they wouldn't float away.

 **To be continued...**

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 **A/N:** Feedback is love and reviews are much appreciated :D


	5. Chapter 5

**Author's note:** This is my second favourite part. Frankly, I just wanted to go crazy on Claire & Owen (finally!) and enjoy their happiness while it lasts. Thank you for being so nice about this story, guys ❤ There's not much left, I promise. So... have fun!

* * *

"You sure about this?" Owen asked, trailing his mouth down her neck while his fingers fumbled with the buttons on Claire's blouse.

Somewhere between changing out of her ice-skates and following Owen to an Italian place two blocks away from the Community Center, pausing every couple of minute to steal another kiss from him, physically incapable to wipe that ridiculous smile off of her face, she knew this was how this night would end. So when he drove her home and parked in front of her house, she reached for the keys and turned off the engine before slipping out of his car, not needing to look back to see if he was following her.

They kept the lights off, her bedroom illuminated by the ghostly light of a streetlamp outside the window, shifting and moving with the sway of the trees in the night breeze.

Claire's nimble fingers unbuttoned is shirt, tugging impatiently at it, pushing it down his shoulders. It got stuck at the wrists, and Owen broke their kiss, panting, to get rid of it. His undershirt followed suit, landing on the floor and he cupped Claire's face in his hands, kissing her, drinking her, his tongue running along her bottom lip before darting between her teeth and into her mouth. She moaned, scarping her nails down his chest, earning a gasp against her mouth and a groan of appreciation in response.

Owen pulled her hair tie off to free the fiery waves of her hair, spilling them over her shoulders, threading his hands through them, over her arms, down her back. She slipped her hand around his neck when her blouse finally trickled down to the floor, soft fabric pooling at her feet while his mouth kept pressing feather-light kisses to her throat, nuzzling into her soft skin, breathing everything that she was, his head swimming.

"Wanted to do this for so long," Owen murmured against her lips. Followed her when she clasped the buckle of his belt and pulled him toward the bed, nearly tripping over the discarded garments of their clothing on the floor with a breathless giggle. He caught her and steadied her, his arm hooked around Claire's body, holding her close to him, gripping her tank top in a fist until she lifted her arms to let him slip it over her head, revealing a cream lace bra, thin and nearly transparent. As if he needed anything else to push him into the abyss.

"I wish you did," Claire stuttered, and eased it off her body, watching his eyes go black.

He lost his jeans, his hands shaking on the goddamn zipper, tempted to tear it out for good, and then peeled hers off, dropping down on his knees in front of her to pepper his way along the waistband of her panties with kisses, loving the sound of her hitched breath, the smell and the silky feel of her skin. Desperate for more. So much more.

She was smaller than he imagined, his palms easily covering the width of her thighs and the narrow circle of her waist, calloused touch to the smoothness and softness that was Claire.

He tugged at her panties with his teeth, glancing up to meet her eyes, her mouth open slightly, her eyelids heavy and her gaze wild. Compelled by the silent invitation, he moved up. Pushed his boxers down and nearly ripped the only piece of fabric remaining in his way off of her in one fluid motion. Owen pulled her to him, hovering over her, trying to take her in, sear the image into his mind, memorize wanting her so bad it was driving him mad. Slowly, he traced his fingers up her infinitely long legs, along her belly, around her right nipple while his mouth closed on the left one. Claire's breathe roughened, her back arching to meet him, hands gripping his hair, fingers digging into his shoulders, scaling the muscles of his back, trying to touch him everywhere at once with the sound of throaty pleasure she couldn't hold back.

Claire rose, nuzzled his cheek, her stomach tight and heavy, the blood in her veins hot and flowing like liquid gold. He grunted near her ear, and a shiver ran down her body. She grazed her teeth against Owen's shoulder, eliciting another low growl of approval from him that sent an almost electric jolt through her. He turned his head, captured her mouth with his, his own body trembling with deep, consuming need, moving closer, almost there.

The first luscious plunge into her ripped fire through him, snagging his awareness until his whole world was nothing but Claire wound tightly around him, pulsing beneath him, her nails digging into his back. She whimpered softly when he pushed further in, filling her to the brim, and Owen paused, muttering an apology, her chest heaving, the world spinning out of control. She swallowed his words with another hot, slow kiss, smiling against his mouth as her legs wrapped around his hips. Closer….

His fingers tangled in her hair, Owen's senses tunneled, zeroed in on a frantic, deliberate quest, the pleasure mounting with every rock of their hips, every breathy moan falling from her lips and brushing to his heated slick skin.

The bliss of filling her zinged across him, washing over Owen like a tidal wave, pooling at his core. Good, so very good. Face pressed into her neck, he moved his hand along her body and between them, and then she was arching beneath him, her breathing frantic. Owen kissed her, hard, his thumb slipping down to find the sweet spot, and she was spiraling away, falling over the edge and into pure delight, sparkling alive all around him, his own sanity teetering on a brink, leaping after her into oblivion.

"Well, shit," he muttered, propping himself up on the elbow, regaining his ability to speak. He brushed her sweaty hair out of her face and then pressed a kiss to her brow, the tip of her nose, riding out the aftershocks of his release, her quirt laughter filling him with sunshine, leaving him liquefied and numb…

"You're quiet," Claire murmured a while later, her awareness still dimmed, basking in the lazy, mellow afterglow with Owen's chest pressed to her back, his body curved around her like a shell, big and warm and real, one of his legs curled over one of hers. Not asleep, though. His fingers kept tracing slow lines along her hips, her belly. Small possessive touches that were leaving tingling trails behind.

He ran his hand up her arm. "It's the first time I've been with someone since…"

She rubbed her cheek against his bicep her head was resting on. "That's a lot of pressure to put on a girl," she told him with a smile in her voice, earning a soundless laugh in response.

He moved her hair aside and pressed his lips to a sensitive spot behind her ear, making her sink back against him. "No pressure," he promised her, his voice low and raspy. "'Twas perfect. You're perfect, Claire."

Her fingers trailed along the inside of his outstretched arm, weaving them through his, his wedding ring cool to the touch, standing in stark contrast to Owen's warm skin. "Tell me about her," she asked.

There was a long pause that made her tense momentarily. Uncharted territory she'd never ventured into was spreading before her, frightening with its vastness.

"You want to talk about my late wife _now_?" Owen asked after she'd already braced herself for the possibility of his leaping away from her and disappearing into the night, leaving nothing behind but an Owen-shaped hole in her front door.

Claire's thumb ran over his knuckles, slowly circling each of them. "I know that your hate pickles, and what your favourite movie is," her voice dropped to a whisper. "But I know nothing about this huge part of your life that made you who you are now." His flingers curled around her, squeezing her hand, and she squeezed his back. "It never felt like my place to pry, but I want to know."

He flexed around her with his whole body, holding on right, making Claire's muscles relax into him, her bones melting, every curve of hers fitting against every one of his.

"We met in college," Owen started. "She was in her second year, I was in my third. Got married a while after Jenny's graduation." His voice was hollow and distant, like he was no longer here at all, consumed by something out of Claire's reach. "She was the kindest person I've ever known, so full of life it was impossible to imagine how she was containing it within her without bursting.

"I joined the NAVY to pay off the school loans. She was entirely supportive even though it wasn't easy on either of us. Harper weren't quite planned, not for a couple more years perhaps, but the day Jenny told me she was pregnant was the happiest of my life. I hated not being there for them as much as I wanted to, but we made it work." He paused, and in the sudden silence, his heartbeat thudding steadily into Claire's back was so loud it enveloped her completely. "I planned to retire about a year from now, settle down at last, finally have what family was meant to be."

Her hand closed tight around his on instinct, the edge in his voice reverberating achingly through her.

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, tickling the back of her neck. "Then she started to tire easily, getting colds that were hard to shake off. We thought it was a seasonal thing, maybe something vitamins could balance out."

Claire pulse tripped over itself, making her wish she'd never asked, and yet making her want to know everything all the same. She squeezed her eyes shut, counting his heartbeats.

"None of us expected the word 'cancer' to come up. We were told we were lucky – it was a stage I lymphoma, and the prognosis was good. Jenny's doctor expected a full recovery. Then, out of nowhere, it spread all over her body almost overnight – no one knew why. Could've been a reaction to the treatment, ironically, or a result of her failing immune system. We moved back here from Michigan. My mother… she's a certified nurse - we thought she could help out when… when it got bad." He trailed off. "You know the rest."

The one thing he left out – the one thing that stayed between him, his wife, and her doctor was that Jenny was pregnant when she was diagnosed. No, she was diagnosed _because_ she was pregnant – at 8 weeks along, she scheduled a routine appointment to run basic blood tests and maybe hear the same line about taking supplements. What she didn't expect was to be sent for biopsy. Until that moment, Owen was ecstatic – they'd been talking about a sibling for Harper for a while now, and the timing was perfect. Until it wasn't.

She was adamant to keep the baby, certain at first that the diagnosis was a mistake, and then – that it would go away in no time. A miscarriage happened after the first round of chemo, her body not strong enough to fight for her life and the baby's. They never said anything to anyone, and what was the point? At the time, he had other concerns to focus on. Yet, it remained that thing that hovered between them sometimes, the one they never mentioned but the presence of which was nearly palpable, and Owen wondered sometimes because he knew she wondered, too.

"Owen, I'm so sorry," Claire whispered. "I shouldn't have-"

"S'okay," he said, dropping a kiss into her hair, seeking solace in her closeness. "You had the right to know. For months, I lived in a state of this odd slumber, like I was on autopilot." His lips brushed to her bare shoulder. "And then you happened, and it scared the living hell out of me." When she looked up, he pushed her bangs out of her eyes, tracing his thumb from her cheekbone and along her jaw. "I used to wake up every morning, wishing it was me who died, not my wife."

Claire wiggled around and rolled over, her eyes searching his face. In near complete darkness, he was unreadable, his features nothing but shadows and straight lines that made him alien and barely recognizable.

"And now?" She asked.

A finger under her chin, Owen lifted it and captured her mouth with his. "And now I can't go a minute without thinking about you, Claire," he breathed out, gathering her closer to him, his hand running over her back as he brushed a kiss to her forehead. "You're the best thing that happened to me in so long it never feels real."

She rubbed her nose into his chest, a dusting of hair across his sternum. "There's probably some medical term for that," she mumbled into his skin, her lips curved ever so slightly.

"There better be," he agreed, slowly threading his fingers through her hair, content for the first time in what felt like forever, and clinging to every precious millisecond of it. The guilt was still there – over feeling this way for Claire, over knowing that he got to live when Jenny didn't, and all the small things in-between, but he was tired, his whole essence starved for feeling alive.

And so he threw himself right into it, leaving nothing behind – no second-guessing, no looking back. Just this, and Claire, and feeling his heart beat in earnest again.

xoox

Claire pushed two pieces of bread into the toaster, her eyes darting toward the coffee machine every few seconds as she waited for it to work its magic, a heavy, bitter smell already filling her kitchen and making her stomach roll in anticipation.

"I told you I'd pick them up," she said into the phone that was squeezed between her ear and her shoulder and shifted from foot to foot, the tiled kitchen floor cold beneath her bare feet.

" _You're a life saver, Claire_ ," Karen repeated for what felt like a hundredth time in a span of two minutes. " _I swear I wouldn't have asked for it-_ "

"It's no problem," Claire interjected, tapping her fingers absently on the granite counter.

 _"Why are you whispering?_ " Karen asked suddenly, her voice also dropping.

"I'm not." Claire grimaced inwardly and looked over her shoulder, biting back a smile.

Owen was still fast asleep when she untangled herself from his grasp half an hour ago to use the bathroom, fully intending to go back to bed afterwards only to realize she was too awake and too wired to do it for fear of disturbing him, and more than a little hungry as well. Hence the coffee and toast.

She did not expect to get a call from her sister at the crack of dawn while she was trying to stay quiet after they barely got any sleep last night, leave alone to endure an interrogation – and Karen was exceptionally good at it. the problem was it was still too damn early for elaborate excuses and frankly, Claire was too filled with the content sense of 'Finally!' to have it in her to try.

" _Yes, you are_ ," Karen insisted.

The bread popped out of the toaster with a mechanic _clank_ of a metal lever, startling Claire, snapping her thoughts back to the present and the red light on the coffee machine finally went out.

"There you are," a voice, thick and hoarse with sleep, came from behind her mere seconds later just as Claire reached for a mug, and when she glanced over her shoulder, Owen was sauntering toward her across the kitchen, sporting a pair of striped boxers and an impressive bedhead, squinting in the light and barely stifling a yawn. Her gaze traveled over his body almost against her will, taking in the lazy grace he was moving with and the way the early morning sun that just started to peek over the rooftops was bathing him in a golden glow.

" _Who's that?_ " Karen's ears perked up.

"Talk later, okay?" Claire muttered, tuning out.

" _Is that-_ "

"Bye, Karen."

Owen's arms slipped around her waist, pulling Claire against him. "Is everything okay?"

"You just gave my sister a seizure," she informed him with a giggle, putting the phone down.

"My bad," he hummed, not sounding even remotely apologetic, and buried his face in her mussed hair.

"How do you like your coffee?" Claire asked, stroking his wrists clasped on her stomach with her fingers.

"In bed, for one thing," he informed her before pressing his mouth to her neck. "Thought you ran off on me at night."

She smirked. "This is _my_ house, Owen."

"And yet you're wearing my clothes… Can't blame a guy for feeling a bit disoriented." He chuckled. "And speaking of which-" his hands tugged lightly on his shirt wrapped around her body and hanging loosely past her hips, "-I might need this back."

Claire turned around in his arms and locked her hands together at the small of his back. "In that case, I'm afraid you might have to take it off yourself, Mr. Grady," she told him. "Because I'm not doing it."

An eyebrow raised, he studied her for a second or two, his eyes narrowed, and then, without a warning, he scooped her up and threw her over his shoulder, earning a surprised yelp that morphed into laughter in response.

In the bedroom, Owen plopped her down on the tangled sheets, muting peals of Claire's laugher with a kiss as his fingers worked on the buttons of the shirt until his hand could slide inside to cup her breast with his palm. She moaned softly and bit his bottom lip mid-kiss, nipping at it in encouragement. Smiling against her mouth, Owen brushed his thumb to her nipple, and she went still under his touch, her breath catching in her throat and her eyes widening.

"You know, for someone who is out of practice-" Claire started breathlessly as he undid the rest of the buttons, but then his mouth replaced his hand on her breast, his tongue tracing its rosy peak as his hand slipped between her thighs, stroking and caressing, and she lost the train of her thought. Her entire world zeroed in on the waves of pleasure building up at her core and pulsing into her belly, the top of her head, the tips of her toes.

"You were saying?" Owen paused and looked coyly at her.

Claire's eyes fluttered shut and she bunched the sheets with her hands. "Don't you dare stop."

His mouth travelled slowly up her chest, pressing hot, open-mouthed kisses to her neck while his fingers did something entirely wonderful, applying just the right amount of pressure to all the right spots...

Claire cupped his face in her palms, claiming his mouth with hers, tracing its shape with her tongue, teasing him, until his own body was nothing but a coiled spring ready to snap. She pushed him back and rolled them over, locking her knees around his thighs and taking him in on a long slide, smiling wickedly at him from above, her emerald eyes holding him. Owen's eyes went almost black with surprise and such raw need it took her breath away, his fingers digging into her hips, her waist, her thighs to hold her closer, fill her completely, leaving palm-shaped marks on her porcelain skin.

Hands splayed on his chest, Claire leaned down to steal another kiss from him only to have Owen rake his fingers through her hair, holding her there, coaxing her awareness away, his other hand anchored on the small of her back as she started to move, searching for the rhythm.

 _Mine_ , he thought when Claire pushed back up for a better angle, thrilled by how easily that concept settled in his mind. He watched her eyes drift closed again, a waterfall of golden curls cascading down her shoulders and falling over her breasts in the early sunlight, glowing like a halo. She seemed ethereal, her body felt like it was out of this world – lithe grace and majestic force, exploding inside and around him with every rock of her hips, every whimper, shattering him and pulling him back together.

She clenched around him, his name a plea on her lips, shuddering and coming apart, and Owen was tugging her down, holding her, feeling the very fabric of reality dissolve around them.

"Okay, now I really have to go," he sighed when the world shifted back into place.

Sprawled over his chest, her hand tracing slow circles over his heart, Claire let out a vague sound of protest, then lifted her head. "Love 'em and leave 'em, heh?" She muttered with a hazy, sated smile stretched over her face.

"Do I have your permission to explain to my mother _why_ I'm late?" He inquired, and she groaned and pushed away from him.

"Get out."

Owen let out a short laugh and pulled her back down, meeting no resistance as he did so. "She asked about you, by the way. After Harper's party."

She cocked her head curiously. "What did you say?"

"Me? Nothing. My kid talked her ear off, though."

"I'm sure she did," Claire hummed.

"Hey." Eyes locked with hers, he traced his thumb along her bottom lip. "Will I see you tonight?"

"Owen…" She hesitated.

With just one question, he reminded her that they still needed to talk about everything that happened. Her worries over this new development in their relationship and his daughter and their history Claire still knew so little about didn't magically disappear simply because she spent the night with him. If anything, they grew worse now that she had so much more to lose. Owen was calling the shots, and she was acutely aware of not being in control, uncomfortable in the role, her inner alarms going off.

There was nothing simple about them, and however thrilling and exhilarating this progression was, it was also terrifying in a way she'd never known was possible. Yet, what Claire _did_ know was the sound of him breathing in his sleep, the warmth of his skin against hers, the way her name was falling from his lips in a breathless whisper laced with pleasure, the mere memory of which was making her heart beat faster. She knew that she wanted _more_.

"It's just a dinner," Owen promised, sensing her hesitation. He twisted a lock of her hair around his finger. "We'll order pizza, watch _Hannah Montana_ , you'll probably hate it. It'll be fun!"

Claire shook her head, her lips curving upwards. "You sure do know how to sell yourself."

xoox

"She couldn't make it again, could she?" Tall and lanky, his dark hair ruffled from running around the soccer field for an hour, Zach glared at Claire from under his eyebrows as if it was her fault Karen didn't come to his game.

Beside them, her younger nephew, Gray, was bouncing on the balls on his feet as he watched the crowds around them, mostly parents and other students, spilling out of the school stadium and heading for their cars. Hands stuffed into the pockets of his hoody, he was waiting patiently for his brother to get over one of his moods so that they could all move on to something else.

It was the year Zach finally made the team. After years and countless hours of practice and drills, he was officially one of the 'herd', which he tried hard to downplay, claiming it wasn't a bit deal, even though he wasn't fooling anyone. His eyes would light up whenever he'd talk about it, his self-awareness nowhere near the center of his attention for however long it lasted. Surprisingly, he was the one who took the divorce of his parents the hardest, and Claire suspected that it was being able to focus on something that had nothing to do with their spilt that helped him get through the worst of it.

Except Karen barely had any time to come cheer for him, and Scott was living out of state now.

"She's working, Zach," Claire explained apologetically.

"On a Saturday?" He snorted, rolling his eyes.

"I'll tell her all about how you guys won," she offered, but he only snickered.

"Don't bother."

And with that, he started toward her car, a gym bag slung over her shoulder, walking ahead of Claire and Gray who trailed a few steps behind him.

"What's with the Grumpy Pants?" Claire asked, throwing her arm around Gray's shoulders, steering him after his brother.

The boy scrunched his nose with mild disgust. "Girl trouble."

"Shut it," Zach suggested evenly without turning, more out of habit than annoyance.

"Oh," Claire drawled knowingly. "You think that all-day breakfast place you guys like so much could fix it?"

Gray grinned at her and shrugged. "It's worth a try." And added after a pause, "You gonna tell us about your boyfriend?"

Claire nearly tripped over her own feet, spluttering for a moment as she gaped at him in surprise. "Why would you… who told you…"

"Mom said you have a new boyfriend," Zach scoffed.

Leaning against the trunk of her car, he was studying the battle of emotions on her face with unmasked amusement, although the colour rising up her cheeks was the only answer he needed, his knowing smirk growing more and more smug with every moment. Suddenly she knew what it was like to be in his shoes, with his younger bother's comments being a constant background noise in his life. And by the look on Zach's face, she knew that he saw it, too. Welcome to hell, Aunt Claire.

"Well, I hope you two are not too attached to her because I might have to kill her," Claire grumbled, unlocking the car and ushering them in.

"Who is he?" Gray demanded, climbing into the back and peeking between the front seats. "Are you gonna bring him over?"

"Please tell me it's not that Lowery character," Zach groaned theatrically, buckling up in the passenger seat next to her.

Claire shook her head and started the car. "For heaven's sake, what's your problem with Lowery?" And muttered under her breath, "I swear to god, Karen…"

xoox

Jennifer Grady was a strikingly beautiful woman.

Claire spotted her pictures scattered all over the house on the day of Harper's birthday party, crowding the walls and shelves – with her daughter, and Owen, and all three of them together, with their friends and family, beaming into the camera to catalogue every memory worth holding on to.

At the time, Claire didn't have time to study them in detail. When she arrived, Owen was already looking like he'd been thrown into the ocean without a raft, practically shaking in panic. There was no time for anything else, and if Claire were honest with herself, she didn't have the heart for it, either, happy to simply enjoy the festivities.

Right now, though, standing in his bedroom and studying the framed picture that was sitting on the dresser, she felt a sharp jab of… not quite jealously, per se. It was ridiculous and petty to be jealous of a dead woman whose life was cut short for no reason whatsoever and who left two lost people behind to paddle around on their own. Of longing, Claire decided. Knowing that she didn't quite fit and would never really belong the way another woman did.

They looked so happy on that photo, looking at each other instead of the photographer that her heart squeezed fiercely. In all the time she'd known Owen, she had never seen him smile like this, be so at ease around her or anyone else. There always seemed to be a certain degree of wariness to him, like he was expecting the other shoe to drop any moment.

Her fingers traced his tuxedo-clad form, taking note of his hair that was a bit shorter then, the curve of his lips more mischievous. Also, it was only now that she really noticed how much Harper looked like her mother – from her dark hair to her posture to the dimples on her cheeks that Claire used to attribute to Owen, but could see now that she was wrong. There was a lot of him in the girl, too, but in more subtle ways. Her determination, for one thing, definitely came from Owen, the way she knitted her eyebrows together when she was pensive or displeased, her resilience and willfulness. And yet, until now Claire didn't think much of how she was a product of two people, not one, and the realization felt oddly unsettling.

She jerked her hand away when Owen walked into the room.

He locked door behind him to eliminate a chance of Harper walking in on anything she wasn't meant to see in the middle of the night and flopped down onto the bed, running his hands wearily over his face. "You'd think putting them to bed would get easier with time, not harder," he muttered, although not without so much affection it was practically radiating off of him. And then he lifted his head when Claire didn't move. "Claire?"

"Hm?" She looked up.

His gaze flickered from her to the picture and then back to her, his own smile dimming. He pushed up to sit on the edge of the bed. "Everything okay?"

"You wife was very beautiful," Claire said with a small, unconvincing smile.

He extended his hand toward her and she took it, her fingers curling around his.

"Does it bother you?" Owen asked, studying her with cautious apprehension.

"That she was good-looking?"

He paused. "That I have the picture here."

It did.

It did for the reasons she couldn't quite explain, which made her feel like the lowest form of life. It wasn't like there was any competition to speak of, but even knowing that Jenny Grady wouldn't burst through the door any second didn't make Claire feel any less inferior, out of place in this house where she didn't belong.

However, when Owen tugged her into his lap, she didn't resist, sinking easily into what was quickly becoming a familiar comfort of his arms. The one she didn't seem to be able to keep away from. Not that she wanted to. It had been a little over 24 hours, and she already couldn't help but think that she could probably spend the rest of her life with her face pressed into his neck, her eyes closed and his pulse fluttering against her skin.

"No," she said softly, her legs on either side of his and Owen's arms locked around her, the touch of his hands electrifying even thought her shirt. "Everything okay with Harper?"

"Mm-hm," he nodded.

The evening was fun, actually.

They did eat pizza and watch _Hannah Montana_ like he promised, and Claire took immense delight in observing Owen's reactions to the TV show that Harper apparently adored and he couldn't stand, perfecting the art of expressing his displeasure with nothing but skilled facial mimicry. The girl didn't question her presence, eagerly climbing into Claire's lap when the latter found a seat on the couch. She explaining the plot line to Claire in that confusing way that consisted of half-finished sentences and a list of character names that were impossible to remember, appalled beyond belief by the fact that Claire never saw a single episode of it before.

That was meant to be it, or so Claire assumed when she came over, but when Harper began to yawn, Owen asked her to wait for him in his bedroom while he ushered his daughter first to the bathroom to brush her teeth and then to her room.

Claire knew she could have easily said no and he wouldn't insist. She could've also simply snuck out and then blamed it on misunderstanding – after all, the sleepover was not in their plans, and she was a coward. However, she found herself inexplicably drawn to the room on the other side of the stairs from Harper's, unable to deny herself the pleasure of being with him, the prospect of repeating the precious night too tempting, filling her with the warm glow.

"How much of this do you think she understands?" Claire asked, her fingers playing with the hair at the nape of his neck.

Owen dropped his forehead onto her shoulder with a disgusted groan. "I hope with all my heart she won't understand any of this until she's at least 25."

She huffed. "Good luck with that."

He lifted his face, his expression pained. "I kinda figured that so long as we cut down on PDA in front of her, it should be okay."

"And there goes a dear dream of mine," Claire sighed dramatically, causing his eyes to pop out in disbelief.

"About making out in front of my daughter?"

She wiggled closer to him, not oblivious to how his eyes darkened momentarily, filling Claire with intoxicating spurt of smug satisfaction over having this kind of power over him, very much aware of the physical response he had no control over. Her fingers slid under the collar or his shirt, arms wrapped around his neck.

"About making out _wherever_ ," she whispered.

Owen's lips lifted up at the corners, curving contemplatively. "Well, we might just have to compensate for that," he noted pensively. His hands slipped up her back and he fell back, taking her with him and rolling them over, pinned Claire to the mattress with his weight and silencing her giggle with a long, searing kiss.

xoox

In the morning, Claire picked up her discarded clothes from wherever they landed the previous night because wearing anything Owen's was out of the question and dressed to the best of her ability, hoping she didn't look exactly the way she thought she did, bedhead and all, her makeup smeared. Still fast asleep, Owen rolled onto her side the moment she slipped from under the covers, claiming the warm spot she just vacated and hugging her pillow to him, sprawled across the whole bed now. He let out and impressive snore, and Claire, who was in the process of pulling her shirt on, smiled despite herself and leaned down to push his hair back from his forehead and brush a light kiss to the crown of his head.

The house was quiet when she pulled the door open a crack and peeked into the hallway. The door to Harper's room stood slightly ajar, the covers half pushed off the girl's bed and draped over a stack of books on the floor.

So far, the silence around her was only interrupted by the low hum of the fridge in the kitchen downstairs, and Claire tiptoed down the two flights of stairs, taking one carefully calculated step after another to avoid creaky floorboards and making a mental note to maybe pay attention to that kind of thing in the future. In the downstairs bathroom, she splashed some water on her face and rubbed the remnants of her mascara from her cheeks, relieved to find an emergency makeup bag in her purse. She brushed her hair, pausing to study the woman looking back at her from the mirror who looked vaguely familiar, her eyes stormy and searching for instructions, but finding none. Until she couldn't bear staring at her anymore.

The living room was bathed in honey-gold sunlight. Her lips quirked ever so slightly at the sight of the giant teddy bear that Owen's friend – Barry, was it? – brought for Harper sitting in the corner near the patio door, taking up nearly one third of the room. The floor was covered with the toys and coloring books, and Claire stepped carefully over them to approach the bookshelf filled with novels, all kind of knickknacks like snow globes and unicorn figurines, and the photos she never had a chance to have a better look at before.

There was the one of Harper and Jennifer Grady. Harper couldn't have been more than two when it was taken, her small hands clasped on a golden chain, hanging around her mother's neck. Owen's wife was laughing, looking down at her daughter like she was the most precious person that ever existed. There was so much love in this image alone, so much warmth and connection it almost hurt to look at it. Like looking at the sun.

Claire let out a sharp exhale and headed for the kitchen before the urge to flee won over what she used to refer to as 'common sense' but what she had no name for anymore.

She pulled a door of one of the cupboards open.

"What are you looking for?"

She span around to find Harper staudy her from the doorway. The girl, still in her blue footie pajamas with cupcakes and with a toy bunny cradled to her chest, was rubbing her eyes sleepily, seemingly not at all surprised to find Claire in her house at 8 o'clock on a Sunday morning.

"Hey, honey." Claire's smile widened, the uneasiness giving way to tenderness. "Where do you guys keep coffee?"

Harper pointed to the right cupboard, and while Claire was figuring out how their coffee machine worked and turning it on, she set her toy on the counter and dragged a chair to the sink before climbing onto it to pick up a clean glass and a box of Cap'n Crunch from the shelf above it.

"You need any help with that?" Claire asked, uncertain of what the protocol was.

The girl shook her head, pushed her messy hair out of her face. "Did you sleep here?"

"Um, yes," Claire cleared her throat, watching Harper's face if a little cautiously while trying to figure out whether or not it was a mistake. Alas, the only memory that sprung to her mind was mentioning maybe going back home and Owen effectively distracting her from that idea.

But Harper just nodded and then reached for the woman's hand. "Let's go watch the movies."

When Owen finally crawled out of the bed, mostly surprised by the lack of commotion often caused by his daughter on the weekend mornings, he found them both in the living room. Claire was sitting crossed-legged on the floor with Harper nestled between her knees, a box of cereal on the coffee table next to them and something bright and painfully Disney playing on the screen.

Arms folded over his chest, he watched them for a few minutes, talking quietly to one another, their spoons clinking against the bowls, something big and bright and warm blossoming in his chest at the effortless ease that Claire treated his kid with, both of them as comfortable as—

Claire must have sensed him because she looked up after a couple of minutes, and then Harper turned to him too, and Owen pushed off the doorjamb to walk over to them, running his hand over his hair in a vain attempt to smooth it down. He plopped down next to them, pecked his daughter on the top of her head and winked at Claire who bit her lip to hold back a smile.

"What are we watching?" He asked, still struggling with the difference between the almost identical princesses, wondering when it was time to give up and allow Harper to run wild with them as she pleased.

" _Sleeping Beauty_ ," the girl answered around a mouthful of cereal.

Owen hummed. "You'd think that after watching it a hundred times, you'd learn not to roll out of bed at the crack of dawn," he teased, poking her in the belly. "Can I have that?" He reached for her bowl, but Harper pulled it away, cradling it to her chest and shielding it with her whole body in what looked to Claire like a familiar game.

"It's mine!" She announced sternly.

"Hey, what happened to 'sharing is caring'?"

"Here, you can have mine." With a roll of her eyes, Claire handed him her half-finished breakfast. "Leave the child alone." She wrapped her arms around the girl, and when he was sure his daughter couldn't see it, Owen leaned over and brushed a quick kiss to Claire's temple, her soft smile not escaping his attention.

 **To be continued...**

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 **A/N:** Feedback is love and reviews are much appreciated!


	6. Chapter 6

**Author's note:** Okay, this is my favourite part so far. It's a bit long, but I hope it's not a bad thing. Also, brace yourselves! And once again, thank you for checking out this fic, guys. It means the world to me 💖

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The next few weeks progressed like not much had changed, save for the few minor adjustments to their routine.

They went to work. Harper went to school. Owen picked up an extra shift at the VA because they were shorthanded on Thursdays. Claire turned her sister's house into a full-blown redecoration project, which Karen was starting to regret, loudly expressing her displeasure over wallpaper runs, and bathroom tile runs, and never-ending paint catalogues, cluttering the rooms that no one could recognize anymore.

Life went on, keeping them busier than ever.

The main difference was that now that their relationship had moved on to a new level, Claire was occasionally staying over at Owen's during the week, which Harper often referred to as 'slumber parties', and once or twice, she even ended up being the one who drove the girl to school in the morning upon Owen's request. And on the weekends, when his daughter was bunking over at his mother's place, he'd sleep at her house.

Now, if he was late to pick up Harper from her ice-skating practice, Claire would simply drive the girl straight to his house after the class and park her at the kitchen table with her homework while she whipped up something for dinner. And on the days when no one felt like cooking, they would order takeout and criticize the performance of _The Voice_ contestants while eating pizza. In the moments when Claire had time to catch her breath, she couldn't help but be deeply mesmerized by how seamlessly their lives merged together, almost catching her off-guard. It was like everything was exactly the same, and yet at the same time it wasn't, and the suddenness of it was leaving her lightheaded.

For the most part, they kept it all on the down low, but her family knew and Harper pretty much outed them to Owen's mother, and that was that. The girl didn't seem to be bothered by this progression, or interested in it in any particular way, for that matter, for as long as she got Claire to play with her or read to her before bed. Although, as far as Claire was concerned, Owen's daughter assumed that she was staying over for her sake, but neither she, nor Owen corrected her, finding it mildly amusing, and also somewhat uncertain of how to address the issue in such a way that would make sense to a 6-year old. Instead, Claire would easily allow the girl to rope her into playing Go Fish and Scrabble every time she'd linger around after dinner - they would both cheat shamelessly, earning dirty looks from Owen, and make up words so long as they could make up what they meant as well.

By an unspoken agreement, she and Owen seemed to have adopted the 'don't ask, don't tell, don't make out in front of a child' policy, and the one time when Harper suggested that Claire should sleep in her room, Owen reminded her gently that there wasn't enough space for both of them, and that was the end of the discussion.

"You're my very best friend in the whole world, Claire," Harper told her one night, studying the constellations on her ceiling that Claire drew there with a phosphorescent paint after she mentioned wanting to ask Owen to buy her the glow-in-the-dark stickers, making it look like a starry sky, complete with a shooting star in the corner.

Squeezed next to her on a narrow bed, her legs dangling over the edge of the mattress that was at least a foot too short for her, Claire turned to the girl and tapped her on the nose with her finger, smiling. "And you are mine."

As for Owen, having him all to herself after his daughter would go to sleep was more than enough for Claire – more than she'd ever hoped for.

She could spend hours, tracing the lines of his body, mapping and scaling the fine contours of his muscles, trailing feather-light touches along the tattoo on the inside of his bicep and the scars that crisscrossed his skin. A sharp line on the inside of his left forearm from a slash wound; a pale mark under his ribs the origin of which he wasn't sure of, only remembering he didn't have before his second tour; a faint circle just below his right collarbone from a stray bullet and a matching one above his shoulder blade where it went straight through him. Barbwire. Sharp rocks. Callouses that never went away. Each of them carrying a story, a passage into a whole different world that she didn't seem to be able to get enough of.

"You're like a map," Claire told him once, kissing the scar from the bullet, her voice a barely audible murmur against his skin.

"Of unfortunate incidents?" He chuckled, one arm tucked behind his head and the other locked around her, his fingers occasionally running over her hair.

"Of everything that brought you to me." She could feel her heart beating out of her chest, pumping her blood in earnest, her mind numb in that pleasant way that felt like pure, unobscured bliss. Sometimes, in the moments like this, the words she carried deep inside her would forget to stay secret.

Owen was wonderful. There was no other word for it. She'd lost count of how many times she woke up to him watching her, his gaze hazy with slumber and his smile soft and sleepy, the early morning sun painting the scruff on his cheeks gold. He would tell her that he was counting her freckles and give her a different number each time.

Before him, Claire couldn't even imagine living in a state of consuming elation that made her hum under her breath as she worked and smile manically whenever her phone would buzz with a new text message. A woman who used to live in her office half the time and spend the other one on the ice-rink, she was now perched restlessly on the edge of her chair more often than not, practically counting the minutes till she could leave, feeling more whole somehow with him and Harper around. Never a 'pack animal' before, she found herself inexplicably drawn to the concept of a unit instead of thriving on her much-treasured independence.

Together, they would take Harper to the park, and Claire would race the girl to the swings to see who could fly higher and punch the holes in the sky, and they would laugh until they couldn't breathe, and the time would stop. She would look at Owen and see his daughter's soul in his eyes, and something else, something that would feel like there were hooks digging deeper into her very essence with every glance, every kiss, every shared laugh, and all the moments in-between. She'd see the man from the photographs, the one who was tossing his one-year old kid into the air, both of them laughing without a care in the world.

Sometimes, it would scare her, the magnitude of everything she didn't know about him, a whole universe hiding just beneath the surface, a different life she couldn't not be curious about even if the curiosity came with a price. Other times, it left her yearning for more - as much as she could get. One smile would make her want to pull the rest of them out of their hiding, whatever the cost.

Years ago, Claire saw a documentary on the Discovery Channel about ships being sucked into whirlpools and tugged to the bottom of the ocean. Massive boats three times bigger than her house pulled into the dark water, helpless and powerless, nothing but toys against the forces of nature. She couldn't help but feel like one of these boats sometimes, her struggle against magnetic pull of Owen and Harper Grady completely and utterly futile.

Once, Claire even took the girl to Zach's game when Owen asked her to watch Harper for a couple of hours one weekend. She allowed Gray, who had a knack for dealing with the technical details of the game, to explain the rules to Harper while the latter wolfed down two hotdogs, neither of Claire's nephews surprised in any way by the appearance of Owen's daughter, and Karen found her beyond delightful, cajoling her sister into bringing both Owen and his kid over for dinner. Which Claire did, although not before she made Karen and the boys promise her not to make a big deal out of it, steer clear of the 'girlfriend/boyfriend' business, and be on their best behaviour.

It almost worked, for ten whole minutes. Claire spent the rest of the time kicking her sister under the table, much to everyone's amusement and Zach's displeasure because half of the blows landed on him, while Karen peppered Owen with a thousand and one questions, covering the topics from his job to his favourite football team, eventually pulling Harper into the conversation and artfully fishing the big secret out of the girl – that Claire was her 'the best ever'. After Biscuit the Toy Bunny, of course. Thankfully, she had enough sense to stay away from the dead wife subject, although Claire wasn't sure if it was basic human decency that did the trick, or her nonstop glaring.

All things considered, it could've been worse.

"You okay?" She asked Owen later when she found him in the kitchen where he escaped under the pretense of helping with cleaning the table while the boys were showing Harper some video game in the living room, their voices filing every corner of the house, threatening to knock down the walls.

"Yeah," he grinned at her. "Didn't really expect a third degree, though."

"Sorry about that," she groaned, pressing her forehead into his shoulder, feeling her cheeks grow hot. She wondered sometimes if her sister ended up in law school because she had a natural talent for sinking her proverbial teeth into people and not letting them go until she was done with them, or if it was something that over a decade in legal environment did _to_ her. A chicken and egg kind of situation, really. "She went easy on you, by the way. Because she likes you."

Owen's eyes darted toward the hallway. "Does she, now?" He brushed a quick kiss to her temple, voice light and soothing. "S'okay. Your family is nice."

Claire lifted her face to look at him, his eyes twinkling with good humour. "Nice? Come on, let's be real here. They're crazy."

"You said it, not me," he hummed.

"No, no, don't let me interrupt anything," Karen commented from behind them, breezing in with a glass of wine and another stack of plates she deposited in the sink, earning a stink-eye from Claire and a soundless, _I'll kill you_. She only smirked at that. "Oh, and, Owen? I think the zombie-fighting gang needs you to come rescue them."

"Right. On it." He gave Karen a look that bordered on honest-to-god trepidation, then winked at Claire, and squeezed past them, heading toward the noise that kept growing progressively louder with every moment.

"Not a word," Claire warned her sister when they were alone before Karen could so much as open her mouth.

"You're glowing," Karen noted smugly, in that infuriating 'I knew it!' voice.

"Shut up," Claire repeated, but the traitorous smile was already tugging at the corners of her mouth, and for once, she didn't mind Karen being right all that much.

They liked Owen, Zach and Gray hanging on to every word that came out of his mouth in the way that looked almost comical. Gray especially was peppering him with endless questions, digging curiously for the details about his time in the NAVY, his eyes bright with interest and wide with amazement, and his food barely touched until Karen nudged him to finish it. Aged eleven, he'd been driving his teachers nuts since day one, but give him a guy equally versed in numbers and statistics, and the kid was happy.

Claire knew they'd like him, but didn't quite expect the immensity of adoration to go this high so fast. Even Zach crawled out of his brooding shell, which barely happened in the past few years. In fact, he dropped his 'coolness' enough to explain his comic book collection to a six-year old girl, and maybe it was nothing for him, but in the grand scheme of things, it seemed like a big deal.

Who knew?

xoox

The dream was always the same.

A dark room and the air so hot and humid it was hard to breathe. It was making him feel like he was drowning, unable to fill his lungs properly, suffocating in the blackness all around him. The air smelled of sawdust and sweat, sunbaked wood and wet soil – the way a garden or a forest would smell after a heavy rain in the summer – and the combination was making him dizzy. His gaze roamed wildly around, looking for a window or a door, a crack between the frames. Anything to let the light and fresh air in, but the place seemed to be sealed shut, keeping him completely cut off the rest of the world.

The darkness wasn't the problem, though – he wasn't alone. Somewhere near him, he could hear someone else breathing. However, the sound appeared to be coming from everywhere around him, and the one thing Owen knew for certain was that he couldn't let himself be found. Couldn't let himself be noticed even. And so he stood right where he was, a rifle gripped in his sweaty hand, barely breathing. And yet, no matter how hard he tried, his heartbeat was growing faster, and before he knew it, it was beating so loudly Owen had no doubt that whoever or _what_ ever was there with him couldn't have possibly missed it. A dead giveaway, no pun intended.

He woke up with a start, his breathing fast and labored as if he'd just run up several flights of stairs and his skin covered with a sheer layer of sweat. He blinked, surprised not to be surrounded by blackness anymore, his gaze fixed on the ceiling and his hands clenching the sheets covering his body. He took in a breath and let it out slowly, his heart still racing but the memory of the dream fading into nothing already. However, the uneasy feeling in his chest remained intact, a reminder that he couldn't get away from his own mind.

Awake and wired, he tossed the covers aside and swung his legs over the side of the bed, the floor cool against his feet, soothing. He squeezed his eyes tight and rubbed his fingers into his eyelids as if physically trying to push the scraps of the nightmare out of his head.

It started about a year ago, not a memory, but a combination of a few, rolled into a worst-case scenario and packed with enough adrenaline to give him a heart attack in his sleep. It never ended, too. He always woke up before he could figure out where he was or what was going on, but every time it came back, Owen would end up unable to so much as close his eyes for the rest of the night, fearing that it might return and never let him go. There wasn't a pattern to it, no way of predicting when it would return, and he wondered sometimes if it was ever going to let him be.

He knew that he could have – and probably should have – talked to someone, knew it was stress catching up with him, threatening to swap him off his feet like a tidal wave and drag him into the sea of chaos. But it never seemed like that big a deal in the light of the day, not until he was trapped inside his mind once again. Ironically, he found it easier to see those things in the others, closing the eyes to what happening in his own head.

The mattress shifted behind him, dipping under the weight of Claire's body when she moved closer to him, undoubtedly also awake now. He felt her before she touched him, the warmth radiating off of her close to him, anchoring him in the present. The vice grip around his body loosened instantly.

"Hey," she murmured, pressing a kiss to his shoulder, and her hair brushed against his skin when she leaned into him, honey-gold softness.

Hands between his knees, Owen dropped his head down, waiting for the rigid muscles to relax, remember that they were not in a combat mode anymore. Another breath. He ran his palm over his hair and down his face, feeling Claire's fingers on his side. A silent reassurance.

"It's nothing, sorry. Bad dream." The words tumbled out of his mouth like dry gravel, and he swallowed hard, feeling his skin stretched too tight over his body. Out of place somehow.

"Talk to me," she asked, resting her forehead on the nape of his neck, her breath soft and warm on his bare back.

Hands clasped together, he stared at them in the dark, trying to make out the lines of his fingers, his knuckles, but everything looked like a shapeless mass and nothing was making any sense.

"There's a man coming to the VA," Owen started after a while, and even to his own ears, he sounded hollow, like he was speaking from a deep well. "And he is… he is so broken, Claire. By everything that he saw and everything he'd been through that I don't know… I can't even begin to guess whether or not the world will ever fell right to him." He trailed off, staring ahead for a few long moments, pushing the images flashing before his mind's eye out of the way. "And I wonder sometimes if I'm just as broken and don't see it. If maybe I'm better at pretending that I'm not."

Her fingers flexed ever so slightly on his skin. "You're the strongest person I've ever met," she told him softly. "Maybe the strongest one there is."

"You have no idea how much it scares me," Owen said, his voice tight and hoarse.

"What?" Claire murmured into his shoulder.

"Needing you the way I do."

"And here I was thinking that I was your rebound," she responded, a smile in her words.

He laughed at that – a short bark of a sound that went through his entire body, and Owen turned to her at last, his fingers pushing through her hair, tilting her face up even though it was hard to see anything, his thumb running over her cheekbone. Surprised, he realized that he was smiling, too.

"It would be so much easier if that was the case," Owen admitted more to himself than to her.

Simpler, for sure.

He was addicted to her – took him about five minutes to get there. Addicted to her laughter, the scent of her skin that was lingering on all of his clothes and linen now, the weight of her body curled into him, and when he tried to figure out when exactly it happened, he couldn't remember not being taken with everything that she was, couldn't remember not kissing her, not feeling like he couldn't get enough of her.

"Just friends, huh?" Barry laughed on the day when Owen was running late and had to ask Claire to go pick Harper up from school during her lunch break, and the two of the stopped by the garage with a bag donuts before she took the girl to Mrs. Carmichael's for the afternoon.

Chuckling, Owen only shook his head and pretended to be focused on the oil-stained guts of an old Ford. Pretended that he wasn't glancing toward the door that closed behind Claire and his daughter, reveling in the scent of her perfume that still lingered in the air, mixed with the smell of glazed donuts.

The grief was still there, the guilt and fear still catching him unawares when he least expected it, but one look at Harper was usually enough to ease that gut-wrenching feeling and push it away. He loved the way his daughter adored Claire. Loved the easy effortlessness between them. Loved watching them paint each other's toenails electric blue and have 'girl talks' he wasn't allowed in on and huffing, mock offended by the exclusion.

It was odd and messy sometimes, making him feel like he was a person inside of a person inside of a person, his thoughts still teeming with the memories of what could have been but never would be. However, the strange part was that he was okay with it, with knowing that some things couldn't be changed and sometimes moving forward was best thing he could do. The idea seemed downright insane not so long ago, and yet, his daughter was teaching Claire how to make waffles now, and he no longer needed to remember the names of all Disney movies because someone else already did.

"Come here," Claire whispered, pulling him to her. She curled her hand around the back of his neck, her fingers gripping his hair.

He leaned eagerly into her, his mouth snagging hers in a slow kiss, searching for the kind of comfort only Claire could offer. His hand slid down her arm and around her waist, hungry and scared and wanting her so badly he thought it might break him. She fitted her lips to his, hot and sweet, the only invitation he needed. Yes, he wanted to say, but it came out a growl of possession against her mouth. A wave of burning needy wanting careened through him, tugging at his every nerve and lighting him up from the inside.

"Wait," Owen mumbled and drew back, panting. Smoothed her hair down with his hand, and then pulled away and crossed the doom in two swift strides. Precaution first. He peeked out the door to make sure everything was fine and his daughter was asleep, and then locked it before returning to Claire, simmering desire pulsing beneath his skin.

She pressed closer to him, allowed him to peel her tank top off, Owen's palms splayed on her ribs, hot on her skin, making her shiver. She smiled, nipping at his bottom lip, coaxing another groan out of him, stealing his breath away.

His face caught between her palms, Claire kissed him deeply, gasping against his mouth when Owen's hands skimmed over her back, fingers tracing the waistband of her panties and sliding underneath it, inching toward her center. Her moan into his ear nudged Owen into action. He pushed her back, leaning her into bed, his focus zeroed in on her taste, the feel of her skin against his. She responded by pressing closer, her hands trialing a path down his belly.

"Need you," Owen chuffed against her mouth between the kisses, wiggling out of his boxers and nearly ripping her panties off, earning a quiet laughter of approval.

The singularity of the moment grounded him, pushing the doubt and fear away. He tucked his hand under her knee and lifted it, sinking into her on a sigh of deep, blinding pleasure that ripped through him, his awareness spiraling away.

He entwined his fingers with hers and slid their hands over her head, adding a delicious stretch, arching into her. A changed angle coaxed a soft sound of appreciation out of Claire, her breath hitched in her throat, fingers flexing around his, nails digging into his skin. She murmured something into his ear, but the blood rush drowned her words as he trailed sloppy kisses down her neck, breathing her in, nearly getting undone when she clenched around him, so close.

Owen let go of her hand, slid his hand down her side, lifting her knee to press it closer to his ribs, burying himself deeper in her sleek heat, dissolving into Claire, perfectly safe, perfectly _here_.

"How do you feel so good?" He murmured into the spot behind her ear, his mouth pressing hot kisses to her neck, her jaw.

He nuzzled into her cheek, feeling her soundless laughter, Claire's hand on her face, stroking his scruffy cheek, her breathing coming out as quiet, breathless moans. Pure delight ricocheted through her as she shuddered beneath him, tucking her face into the crook of is neck to muffle a whimper of release, quaking around him while Owen continued to move ever so gently, sliding in and out of her until his own body contracted around hers. His hands gripped her skin, her hair, a white-hot wave of deep, consuming satisfaction crashing over him, dragging him into the depths of sparkling oblivion.

A hand on her cheek, he turned her face to him, capturing her mouth with his, panting and breathless, and wanting more, stilling above her at last, spent and happy and whole.

"Hi," Claire murmured, the words morphing into a giggle.

"Hi," Owen bumped his nose against hers.

"Don't go." She tightened her grip on him, fingers carding through his hair, framing his face.

"I'm too heavy," he protested, if a little half-heartedly, perfectly content with the idea of staying like that for a while, with her wound around him.

"Mm, good."

Still, he shifted, moving just enough to make sure he wouldn't smother her, but still half-draped over her body, his sweat-sticky skin clinging to Claire's, his forehead resting against hers.

"You okay?" She asked, running the back of her fingers over his cheek, her voice a barely audible whisper.

"Slightly out of breath," Owen admitted, brushing his lips to her shoulder.

"Not what I meant."

"Yeah," he breathed out. "Yeah, I am." Which, to his surprise, wasn't an automatic lie or one of those 'Fake it till you make it' moments, which was his go-to tactics for the past ten months. Because this was Claire, and somehow, all was right in the world when he was with her. "Gimme a sec," he mumbled, slipping from under the covers and padding into the bathroom to get cleaned up and splash some water on his face, his muscles pleasantly liquefied and his mind empty, a blank page.

When he returned back, Claire was curled on her side, facing his, cocooned in a pool of tangled sheets. She pushed up on her elbow to kiss him when Owen climbed into bed again, meeting him halfway, languid and soft. He pulled her to him, tucking her into his embrace until she was nestled neatly into his body and there was no telling where he ended and she began. Pressed a quick kiss to her hairline, breathing her musky scent.

"You're not broken, Owen," she muttered into his collarbone just as he was starting to think she'd drifted off. Pressed her mouth to his skin. "I would know."

He chuckled, unable to hold it back. Ruffled her hair affectionately. "No, you wouldn't. You're biased."

Claire snorted. "Am I now, Mr. Grady?"

"Is it weird that it turns me on when you call me that?"

"Do I have no answer?" She huffed and jabbed her finger into his ribs for good measure. Scooted closer to him and rested her chin on his chest, not hearing his heartbeat so much as feeling it, vibrating through him and into her. "Want to talk about it?"

He shook his head. "S'nothing, just old scars letting themselves known." He looped her hair around her ear, a gush of appreciation gathering in the space under his heart. "I promise."

"Zach asked if you could come to his game tomorrow," she said, choosing not to push. If there was anything she'd leaned about Owen in the past few months, it was that there was no point in trying to pull anything out of him if he didn't want to talk about it. Giving him time and letting him come to her on his own terms usually did the trick.

Owen's eyebrows hit his hairline. "He did? Really?"

"I think they want to adopt you," she informed him gravely, rubbing her nose into his chest, and then rested her cheek along the curve where his shoulder met his neck, finding a comfortable spot.

He smirked, clearly pleased. This was tuning into an inside joke for them, the adoration of the Mitchel brothers as intense as it was sudden. "I don't know, baby. I work until 3, but you guys should go."

Claire paused for a moment. "You wouldn't mind?"

"Why would I? With all the time Harper spends with you, we basically have a joint custody of her," he huffed, his fingers threading lazily through her hair. She stayed quiet. "Claire?"

"And… you're okay with that?"

Frankly, he had no idea. Until a few moments ago, it wasn't something he even contemplated, and then the words were suddenly out of his mouth, and it felt like all the pieces of the puzzle had clicked into place. While Owen was busy worrying about how she was going to fit into their lives, she went and did just that, no second-guessing, no looking back.

He meant it as a joke, but it wasn't. Not really. Harper was utterly infatuated with Claire, running to her whenever the latter would be in her line of sight, her face lighting up like Claire was the sun.

"She loves you, Claire. If she didn't, this," he slowly trailed his hand up her spine, "would be much less fun. So no, of course, I don't mind." Let out a long breath, smiling to himself when she trailed her toes along his calf. "You're not a rebound. Never were. You're…" _everything_ "…you."

He forgot, Owen thought. He forgot what it was like to want someone so bad. Forgot what it was like to look into another person's eyes and see the whole universe in them, the worlds both within and out of his reach, infinite and limitless. Forgot what it was like to be hungry for this feeling.

No, forgetting would imply the erasure of a memory. In truth, he forgot how to _allow_ himself to feel that way. But now that the floodgate was open, it was all rushing in faster than he could process it, a vortex of sensations sweeping over him, swift and wild. And a part of him didn't trust that feeling yet, terrified of losing it again.

"And I'm trying—" he added, still prodding at what felt like a whole new organ meant to contain the feelings he wasn't sure how to process yet; the one he sometimes feared could burst from being so full. He might have as well been tossed into the ocean without a life raft. "I swear to god I'm trying, but if I'm doing something wrong, just… just tell me what is it, and I'll fix it."

"I love her, too. You know that, right?" Claire's fingers ghosted over his skin, feeling the tension gripping her body finally dissipate, a sigh of contentment escaping her chest. "And you're not doing anything wrong. Not from where I'm standing."

xoox

On the anniversary of Jenny's death, Owen took Harper to the cemetery – just the two of them, no Claire. They stopped at the flower shop to buy two bouquets of tulips, Jenny's favourite, to leave them at her grave.

Owen was still struggling with the extent to which his daughter understood the concept of death at her age, making his conversations with her about the matter bumpy at best and barely coherent at worst. He explained to her that it was okay to be sad sometimes and to miss her mother and the things they used to do together, like riding their bikes and baking muffins (which was a disaster when _he_ tried to do it that ended with Harper crying). But he always made sure to mention that there also was nothing wrong with feeling good about finding new things that were making her happy. That life went on.

Harper held his hand as they navigated their way between the older crosses and newer tombstones, more interested in the statues of weeping angles covered with moss, their wings chipped, than the fact that it had been a year since her mother died – something that he found equally reassuring and endlessly sad.

When they found the right spot after taking the wrong turn twice, he placed the flowers at the base of a grey granite tombstone, and then Harper did the same before stepping back and looking up at him expectantly, the skirt of her dress swaying in the spring breeze.

Owen rubbed his neck, suddenly awkward and lost and uncertain. There were so many things he wanted to tell Jenny, so many ideas he wanted to share with her, and yet when he tried to come up with words, they all felt wrong and small and not enough to express what he was feeling. He missed her, a part of him still waiting to hear her laughter, the sound of her voice. He wished she could know how much their daughter was like her in everything from her looks to her mannerisms to her disgust with black olives.

In the end, he crouched down beside Harper and put his arm around her small body.

"You want to say something to mommy, baby?" He asked in a light voice that broke toward the end f the question.

"What?" Harper asked, peering down at the patch of grass and the flowers before her.

"Anything."

"Is she there?" She asked, pointing at the ground.

Owen hesitated. "Not really, I don't think so."

Harper turned to him. "Where is she?"

He smiled weakly at her, racking his brain for an appropriate response. "Everywhere, I believe."

Her eyebrows pulled together in confusion. "How come?"

Okay, this was not in the books. "Like…um, you know how the water can turn to steam and float away and you can't catch it in a glass or a bottle? This is how mommy is – she'd not here with us, but she'd still around." He paused, then tapped her on her chest with her finger, feeling his lips stretch into a small smile. "She's in your heart, in your memories. Every minute even when you can't see her."

After a moment of consideration, Harper nodded, then looked at the tombstone again, her eyes running over the engraving that read ' _Jennifer Rose Grady – May her memory be eternal'_ and the dates of her birth and death.

And then she turned to Owen. "Can we get ice-cream on the way home?"

When the doorbell rang later in the afternoon while Harper was playing in the living room, Owen thought it was his mother, fueled with worry, undoubtedly remembering the dreary day a year ago and how it passed in a slow, painful haze for all of them. Instead, when he pulled the door open, he found Claire on the other side, her expression unsure. Her gaze flickered over his shoulder and inside the house for a brief moment.

"Sorry to barge in on you guys today, but I kind of forgot something here," she began apologetically. "It's a black planner, probably in your bedroom somewhere. If I could just-"

Owen didn't let her finish before he crossed the two feet between them in one fluid motion and enveloped her in his arms, only now realizing how much he missed her in the time since they'd last spoken yesterday when he stopped by her house to tell her about the trip he planned for today with Harper, and how much he needed her, the weight of this day lifting off his shoulders in an instant.

By an unspoken agreement, he didn't ask her to sleep at his place and Claire didn't offer to come over, giving him the required time and space to deal with this ordeal on his own. This was still the territory they rarely ventured into, barely ever mentioning his wife since their first night together. Not avoiding the topic so much as trying not to cut open the healing wound. And she was resolved to leave him and Harper be until they were ready for a company, feeling like this wasn't her place to interfere, but she really needed those phone numbers, and after turning her whole house upside down and not finding her planner, she figured out that there was only one place left to look.

Frankly, a part of her hoped they be gone still and she'd use the spare key Owen kept in the flowerbed for the emergencies, sparing them the need of dealing with the _invasion_. The fact that they were back already caught her by surprise.

"Come on in," Owen said, tugging Claire inside and toward the empty dining room.

"How did it go?" She asked quietly, sneaking a peek inside the living room where Harper was talking quietly to her Beanie Babies.

"Good," he breathed out and rubbed his forehead. "I think." His helpless expression made Claire's chest tighten. "No idea how much sense it makes to her but it's like she misses not doing arts and crafts with her mother rather than the notion of her in general, you know?" Which probably wasn't a bad thing, he was starting to realize, if a little foreign to him.

Claire nodded, not quite sure how to respond. She stepped closed to him and traced her fingers down his face. "And you? Are _you_ okay?"

Owen placed his hand on top of hers, holding it to his cheek for a few seconds, his stubble both rough and soft against her skin. "Better now. Glad you came." He kissed her fingers. "Can you stay?"

"I wasn't planning to…" She began.

"Please." He asked, moving closer to her to brush his lips to Claire's, and her hand closed almost imperceptibly around a handful of his shirt.

There was a blur of motion she caught out of the corner of her eye, and both of them pulled back from one another at once to find Harper watch them from the hallway, her eyes wide and darting wildly between the two of them in confusion mixed with shock.

Claire's hand dropped down to her side. "Sweetie…"

The girl turned on her heel and bolted down the corridor.

"Shit," Owen muttered under his breath and rubbed his eyes. And then the back door slammed loudly, the sound ricocheting off the walls. "Shit!" He repeated.

"Harper!" Claire was the first to burst out onto the back porch, her eyes dashing around in panic.

"Harper!" Owen barked moments later, both of them searching the small space as if she could pop up out of nowhere.

There was a low hedge on one side of the yard and a three-foot tall wood fence on the other, a couple of garden chairs sitting under the apple tree and an old bike parked near the porch. Harper was nowhere to be seen.

"Go to Mrs. Carmichael," Claire said in a shaky voice, gesturing vaguely toward the old lady's house as she started for the gate across from them leading to the back alley. Owen normally kept it shut but she doubted it ever stopped anyone, let alone a crafty six-year old.

"Shit," Owen repeated once again and smack his fist on the wall of the house before disappearing inside again.

The back alley lined with mismatched fences and garage walls was empty.

"Harper!" Claire called out again, cold panic churning in her stomach, and headed right until the alley spat her onto a busy street buzzing with people and traffic. There was no sign of the girl, and if she did go that way, it would be impossible to find her in the crowd. Would she go that way? She didn't know, couldn't know. Her fault….

Owen was probably calling 911 now, she thought.

She checked her phone on the off-chance that he found his daughter at Mrs. Carmichael's but there was nothing, and so she turned around and ran toward the other end of the alley that opened onto a quieter residential road, beads of sweat trickling down her back even though the air was cool, making her shiver. The rush of adrenaline in her system left her shaking as the world tilted slightly before her eyes, looking terribly, awfully wrong.

There was a mother with a stroller rounding the corner and an older gentleman with a shabby-looking dog climbing up the porch steps about five houses down the block, and in front of her, there was a park.

"Harper!" Claire jogged across the street and toward the empty playground.

Sitting on the patches of grass and dirt, it looked eerily abandoned in the sunny afternoon.

"Please, come back," she begged under her breath, feeling her eyes start to burn. Her fault, her fault, her fault…

She looked up the slide shaft and checked the bright-blue crawl tubes, winding around the monkey bars, ready to head back and start again with the street, sick at the idea of wasting all the time. As a last resort, Claire glanced into the playhouse, more to be certain that she'd covered everything there was, but sure enough, there the girl was, sitting in the corner with her hands wrapped around her knees and staring at the bare wall in front of her.

"Honey…" For a moment, Claire was so overcome with the relief that she thought she'd collapse on the ground. The doorless archway leading inside was too small for her to squeeze through, so she sank down near the thick plastic wall just outside of it, breathless. "You scared me so much."

Harper didn't say anything, only her hands flexed, tightening around her knees, her lips pursed stubbornly together – the only sign of acknowledgement she expressed.

"Sweetie, I'm so sorry," Claire began. "Can we talk?"

"Why?" Harper asked flatly.

Claire pulled her phone out of the pocket of her slacks and texted Owen, _Got her, will be back soon_.

"What do you mean, why?" She asked, putting it away again. "Let's go home, please? Your dad is worried sick."

Harper glanced at her from under her knitted eyebrows. "What does it matter?" She dropped her gaze down. "He's already replaced mommy with you. Soon he'll replace me with a new baby, too."

Claire let out a shuddered breath and leaned her back against the playhouse, wishing she could tear the whole thing apart. She pinched the bridge of her nose, her heart pounding. "It's not what it is, I swear," she said helplessly, willing herself to sound steadier than she was probably capable of.

"It's not?"

"Of course, it's not! Harper, please, come out of there."

The girl didn't move. "If it's not true, then why does he need you?" She asked crossly after a minute or two, reminding Claire of the same little person she'd met all those months ago, determined and uncompromising, her eyes full of mistrust, determined to make the world bend around her.

Oh, god. Claire let out a long exhale. "Because he gets lonely sometimes and needs a friend."

"But he already has me, and Grandma," Harper objected firmly. "And Barry."

"It's a bit more complicated than that," Claire muttered.

"How?"

She hesitated. "I think it's the kind of thing he will explain to you when you're a little bit older."

"When I'm ten?" Her voice sounded closer this time, and when Claire glanced into one of the windows, she saw that Harper moved to the wall near the door, too, her tone losing the edge with each word.

"Something like that," Claire responded. "Look, I'm sorry you saw—Your daddy loves you very, very much, honey. More than anything in this whole world. He would never, _ever_ want anyone else instead of you, no matter what." The girl didn't say anything, and Claire's teeth dug into her bottom lip until it hurt so bad she could feel her eyes start to water. "Are we still friends, you and I?" She asked.

"I don't know," Harper replied after a long pause.

"If I ask you something, can you be honest with me?"

Another pause. "Okay."

Claire squeezed her eyes tight, her hand holding on to the silver necklace around her neck – a nervous habit. "Do you want me to stop being friends with your dad?"

The time stopped, and the world turned sharp. In the sudden stillness that settled around them, she could hear the rustling of the leaves above them, the whisper of the tires on the asphalt down the street, the wind tugging at the tree branches, making them scrape against one another. The sun was shining bright in the clear blue sky, streaked with wispy clouds, and Claire hadn't realized she was counting in her mind until she reached twenty and lost track of the numbers.

And then Harper said, "Yes."

Claire's breath caught in her throat and she swallowed past the burning lump coiling there. For a moment she pressed a hand to her mouth, willing herself not to dissipate, and hoping that she would. She inhaled sharply. "Okay."

"Really?"

Claire turned and saw the girl on her fours, peeking from the entryway, her expression uncertain, like she was expecting Claire to change her mind or say that it was a joke, her brows furrowed over her dark eyes, a smudge of dirt on her chin. Quickly, Claire wiped away a tear from her cheek before Harper saw it, and smiled, hoping it looked genuine enough and not as forced as it felt.

"Of course," she nodded. "That's what friends do – they make sure they don't upset each other, and if something makes you upset…"

Harper crawled out of the playhouse and reached for Claire.

"Oh, sweetheart…" She enveloped the girl in her arms, stroking her soft hair, and kissed the top of her head, a tsunami of relief and despair crashing through her in a force so strong it was making her shake. "Let's take you home now, okay?"

Owen was waiting for them on the front porch when Claire and Harper turned onto their street. He leaped down on to the pathway in one step and crossed the distance between them in a few quick strides, scooping his daughter into his arms, so visibly relieved Claire could feel it radiate off him in waves that threatened to knock them all to the ground.

"God, you scared me," he muttered into her hair when Harper's arms clasped around his neck.

"I'm sorry," she mumbled into his shoulder.

"Me, too." He turned to Claire and mouthed a silent _Thank you_ , and she nodded, her lips quivering, and the goddamn lump was lodged in her throat again. "You're so in trouble, but we'll figure it out later, deal?" The girl nodded. "Good. Let's go home."

"Actually, I have to take off," Claire began when he started toward the house, and Owen stopped short and turned around, finally sensing the shift in her, the pointed distance she was keeping from him.

"You don't have to leave," he reassured her lightly, clearly reading it wrong, and when Claire's glance darted toward the girl, Harper looked away.

"I think I do."

Owen set his daughter on the ground. "Go inside, honey, we'll be there in a minute." Another nod. He jabbed his finger at her. "And no sneaking out," he told her firmly. "Okay, what's going on?" He asked Claire when his daughter climbed up the steps and disappeared behind the door, although not without a brief hesitation.

She exhaled slowly, then squared her shoulders and lifted her chin to look him in the eye. "You know when you said that this – us – was too much, too soon? Well, I think you were right."

He was frowning now, too, trying to see past her façade, and based on the deep crease between his brows – without much success. "What happened? Did Harper-"

"No," Claire interjected quickly. "It's not her. Or you." She paused to push her hair behind her ears, but mostly to have a chance to steady her voice that was about to break. "It's me. I'm not ready for any of this, Owen. And neither are you, and you know it. I knew it would be hard but I didn't really-It's too much. I'm sorry."

His face fell, a mixture of hurt and confusion washing over it, and his shoulders slouched like she'd hit him. "What—I don't understand. What are you talking about?"

"I'm sorry," she shook her head.

"Claire…"

But she'd already turned around and started toward her car, knowing he wouldn't follow her, knowing he wouldn't leave his daughter behind. Which was a cheap and cowardly move, and he deserved more, an explanation for sure, but she feared that if she uttered another world, she'd shatter. Lock, key, start the engine, buckle up, her hands going through the motions on autopilot, her mind on fire. Deep breath, another one.

Owen was still standing on the sidewalk when she tore off the curb without looking his way once.

xoox

Inside the house, Owen found Harper in her room, sitting on her bed, _The Lorax_ open in her lap. It had been a couple of months since she'd read it, and he hoped they were done and over with it, its return feeling like an omen.

"So…" Still dumbstruck, he lowered onto the end of her bed and rubbed his chin, his head oddly empty, the thoughts scattered around.

She'd never done anything like this before, never so much as slammed her bedroom door, and running away… this was not the kind of behaviour he would condone, whatever the circumstances, but he didn't have it in him to argue with her now, especially today, of all days. _Not ready_ … what did it even mean? He glanced at Harper who was turning the pages of the book slowly, but it was clear she wasn't reading it, her eyes skimming over one picture before moving on to the next.

"I'm sorry," he said after a while. "I should have… talked to you. Explained everything. What you saw-" He stuttered and faltered.

"Where's Claire?" She asked when he didn't add anything else.

Her name jolted like a bolt of lightning through Owen, ripping his heart open.

"She left."

Harper paused, then turned another page, still without lifting her gaze up. "When's she coming back?"

He heaved a weary sigh, staring straight ahead at the music box sitting on the top of her dresser. "I don't think she is, pumpkin." It felt worse to say those words out loud than to just know it, the sound of them making it final. Like the last nail in his coffin. He pushed the morbid metaphor out of his mind, frustrated. They both sat in silence for what could've easily been a minute or thirty. "You want to do something special for dinner?" He asked when the silence interrupted only by the rustling of the pages of Harper's book grew too heavy to bear it.

The girl shrugged.

"We could go to McDonald's, get Happy Meals," he added some pep to his voice. She was not off the hook, but they both needed to catch a break for maybe 15 minutes before he was ready to deal with everything else. "What'd you say?"

She tore her gaze away from _The Lorax_ to give him a measured look. "But you don't like it."

"Well," Owen leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped together, "It's been a weird day. I just figured we could both use something with the word _happy_ in it."

Harper shook her head. "S'okay, I don't want to."

"'Kay then." He patted her on the ankle and pushed up to stand. Frankly, he only offered it for Harper's sake, feeling sick to his stomach and still riding off the adrenaline rush, quite relieved she'd said no. The idea of being surrounded by people and cheery music was about as appealing as pouring gasoline over himself and lighting a match. "Let me know if you change your mind."

"Daddy?" Harper called after him when he was already in the doorway. "Can you make that thing Claire always makes?"

Owen's forehead creased in confusion. "What thing?"

"The puppies?"

It took him a moment to figure out what she was talking about. "You mean cheesy hush puppies?" The girl nodded, and he felt his mouth curve into an almost-smile. "Sure thing, kiddo."

 **To be continued...**

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 **A/N:** Reviews are love! Please let me know what you think :)


	7. Chapter 7

**Author's note:** It's been a while but I'll do my best to post the last chapter as soon as I can as I would like to make sure that all my finished fics are taken care of properly. Thank you for your patience and I hope you'll like the last 2 parts of this fic :)

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There were moments in each person's life that were meant to stay with them forever. Some memories would fade off eventually, losing their sharpness and focus, while these other few select snippets of time would stay seared in their minds for the rest of their life.

Claire had heard her kneecap break before she had felt it. A soft, dry sound like knuckles knocking, or one's stiff neck rolling from side to side. Her fall had happened like in slow motion, and when her knee met the ice, her only thought had been – _Who left crackers here?_ It couldn't have been more than a fracture of a second before the white-hot pain, so intense that Claire had nearly blacked out, zapped through her entire body, pulsing in her left leg as if it had been set on fire.

Somewhere in the periphery of her attention, she could hear voices, could hear someone running towards her – her coach? Other students? She had tears streaming down her face, her vision blurred and her entire body coiled into a tight ball on the ice. And all the while she couldn't stop thinking – why me?

There was a pale vertical scar running closer to the inside of her left knee now, nearly 4 inches long, a constant reminder of the day that had turned her life upside down in a matter of seconds. The first time Owen had noticed it – on their first morning together, both of them delirious beyond themselves – he traced it with his fingertips, pressing soft kisses to the whole length of it. Long accustomed to it and barely ever shying away from short shorts and knee-length dresses, Claire felt self-conscious all of sudden and tried to pull away from his touch, but he'd told her that everything that had made her who she was was beautiful.

In the past, the men she had been involved with were either curious about it in a way that made her feel vaguely uncomfortable, or pretended it wasn't there at all, either not interested or not caring about that part of her life. That was something that she knew how to deal with. Hearing someone say that it was a part of her, acknowledge it as something that had ultimately led to who she'd become was new. It had filled her with exhilaration, and the previously unfamiliar to her wholeness of sorts as though no one had ever really _seen_ her or accepted all of her before.

In the years following the accident, Claire couldn't look at the scar without reliving that fall time and time again, one excruciating second of it after another, followed by months of painful physical therapy mixed with her fear of never being herself again that threatened to tear her apart from the inside. It had taken her a very long time to learn to perceive her scar the way Owen did – as something that was as much a part of her as her lungs or her heart or the colour of her hair. An attribute rather than a defining factor. That there was more to her than those few seconds on the ice.

And yet now she was certain she'd much rather get the phantom pain back than deal with the memory of his lips pressed to her skin, his breath rising goosebumps along her whole body, lazy strokes of his fingers over her skin.

It didn't surprise Claire he'd pulled Harper out of the ice-skating classes, and if she were completely honest with herself, it came as a relief, too. A bittersweet one, but a relief nonetheless, although she certainly appreciated finding her planner, one that she'd forgotten entirely about on the day she'd left him standing in his driveway watching her speed away, sitting on the outer windowsill on her porch one night when she'd returned home from work.

The one thing she didn't anticipate was, perhaps, the feeling of dullness that had settled over her after he and Harper disappeared from her life. It was as if everything went from technicolour to mono, the world around her switching to faded shades of grey.

The rational part of Claire knew it made little sense. They'd barely been together for a few weeks, and yet…

Even Karen, for once, made no comment about the change of her 'circumstances', and it unnerved and unsettled Claire. Surely, one barely-a-relationship wasn't meant to tear down her carefully constructed world in a matter of days, was it?

She was not going to let it do it.

So she did the one thing she knew how to do – she threw herself into her work and countless hours on the ice, ignoring the dull ache in the overworked joint and choosing to pretend that nothing had happened, until her heart stopped leaping whenever her phone would ring or a car would pass by her house at night. Until on the night of a fierce thunderstorm, she found herself sobbing into her pillow, her body trembling as nature raged outside her window.

xoox

Claire didn't pick up any of his calls, and Harper refused to go anywhere near the Community Center, and eventually, Owen had to give up on both fronts. Between his daughter's unwillingness to explain anything past _I don't want to_ , which she considered a good enough reason to stop doing anything, and Claire's closing the skating rink down for two weeks, he was starting to feel like he was flinging himself against a brick wall, except there were walls wherever he'd turn, thick and tall and impenetrable. Trapped inside them, Owen was starting to feel like screaming, except he doubted that it would work.

When after a week of complete radio silence, he finally saw the light in the round windows and there Claire was again, performing her routines, weightless and smooth and entirely magical, Owen found the doors locked and the music too loud for her to hear him knocking.

The image of her, so close and yet so unattainable, her eyes half closed as if she was moving in a dream, felt like a sucker-punch to his stomach. He considered waiting for her to finish, finding a way to talk to her, but even though he was many things, dense wasn't one of them. Her message was loud and clear – she wanted to be left alone, and the best Owen could do was give her just that.

In the days and weeks following their odd conversation, he went through it at least a thousand times in his mind, trying to hear what he hadn't heard the first time around. But after a while, it got easier to accept her words for what they were rather than keep driving himself crazy over the possible hidden message in them.

Instead, he piled up the hours at the shop and the VA office, barely leaving one or the other to snag a few hours of restless sleep and take his daughter out for ice-cream. But even in those moments, Harper had a detached air to her, like she was also doing it for him and not for herself, which left Owen even more confused and lost and exhausted. More often than not, she'd be more than eager to go back home and read her goddamn Lorax.

"Are you trying to leave us all unemployed?" Barry asked Owen jokingly a time or two when he'd arrive at the shop to find his friend already hard at work barely at the crack of dawn and leave while Owen was still tinkering with something. But even he had dropped it after a while, in part because of lack of response, and in part because the Owen had started to resemble a ghost.

The only drastic change that happened in this time, one that no one else seemed to have noticed, was that Owen moved his wedding photo from his nightstand to the dresser across the room. And that he finally took off his wedding ring – not for or because of Claire, but for himself. It was time, he decided, to close that chapter of his life, seeing as how trying to reread it couldn't possibly lead to a different ending. Maybe he could try and turn the page at last.

One night, a few weeks later, he woke up when a peal of thunder exploded outside and scattered across the sky, rattling the windows in the hallway and making the trees outside his window shiver. The lightning pierced the clouds, splitting the world in half, so bright that for several long moments, he could see every item in the room like it was daylight.

"Daddy?"

Owen rubbed his eyes and turned his head to find Harper hovering in the doorway, her arms wrapped around her bunny.

"C'mere," he jerked his chin toward the other side of his bed, and she ran around the heavy oak frame and climbed under the covers, pulling the blanket over her head.

She'd been doing this for as long as Owen could remember. As soon as they had swapped her crib for a 'big girl' bed, whenever the storm would hit, Harper would pad into his and Jenny's room and wiggle her small body between them. She wasn't scared of the weather, she'd tell them, she just didn't trust it when it was angry.

The memory brought a small smile to his lips. How long had it been since this happened? He tried to recall the last time it rained this hard, but came up empty, saddened by the realization that some part of him must have started to believe that she grew out of her fear of thunder without him noticing.

"It will be over soon," he whispered, patting a lump of her body.

"Big ones never last," Harper's muffled voice came from under the covers.

Frankly, Owen had no idea, but since it was the only consolation he could offer in the situation that was entirely out of his control, they both chose to believe it was true.

"Never," he confirmed nonetheless.

"I'm sorry, daddy," she said when Owen started to believe she'd fallen asleep, and when he glanced at her, she was looking at him from her small cocoon.

He threw a hand behind his head. "Hey, I don't trust this weather, either," he reassured her.

"No." Harper's face grew serious, her dark eyes huge. "I'm sorry I made Claire go away."

For a long moment, Owen didn't say anything, his eyes locked on the shadows moving wildly over the ceiling as the wind tore at the trees outside, nearly bending them in half. After months of hearing _Claire this, Claire_ _that_ every single day, Harper barely mentioned her since the day she'd caught them kissing, usually saying her name in passing, like she didn't mean to.

Owen waited for her to start asking questions after a while about why Claire wasn't around anymore, but she never did. Then again, she barely mentioned his and Jenny's friends from Michigan, or even her own from preschool. He never thought much about that, deciding that for a child, those memories didn't stick for long. Out of sight – out of mind, something like that. Plus, he'd figured she might have still been harbouring a minor grudge against the whole incident in the kitchen, which was something he didn't know how to approach.

Now, though, he turned to her slowly, not sure how to respond.

"You didn't, baby," he promised her at last. "Wasn't your fault."

"But it was," she insisted.

"No, it wasn't-"

"I asked her to leave and she did," Harper blurted out, cutting him off just as another clasp of thunder rolled outside, nearly making the whole house shudder and setting off a car alarm or two somewhere down the block.

Owen's brows knitted together in confusion. "What do you mean?"

And so she told him.

xoox

Claire saw them the second they walked through the doors, the sight so unfamiliar now, after several weeks of their absence, that she'd nearly lost her balance for a moment, a sharp edge of her skate catching in the dent in the otherwise smooth surface. It left Claire teetering in fear for a second, not used to being thrown off balance in her only comfort zone.

They were not the first though – a few other kids were already practicing awkward jumps, showing off in front of one another, and a couple of parents were sitting on the bleachers, seemingly set on staying to watch the practice.

She was tempted to ignore Owen and pretend that she didn't see him, but this kind of attitude felt hardly fair toward Harper. It was not the girl's fault, after all, that the three of them had collided into one another in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Claire skated over to them, a plastic smile on her face. Her gaze slipped past Owen, barely registering his hair that was slightly longer than the last time she saw him and a sheer layer of jittery energy that was impossible to miss, choosing to focus on Harper who was smiling earnestly at her.

"Hey there, buddy, haven't seen you in a while," Claire said, hoping that her ability to read the room wasn't entirely askew. "You here for a class?"

The girl nodded, then paused for a brief moment before beaconing for Claire to lean closer to her. Her eyes darted toward Owen who immediately stepped back, his hands lifted in the air in a universal _You're-on-your-own_ gesture.

Puzzled, Claire stepped off the ice and crouched down in front of Harper, reaching for her hands, surprised by how much she'd missed the girl and trying oh so hard not to think of her father, standing about ten feet away from them, his eyes boring a hole in her skull.

"What is it, honey?" Claire asked softly.

Harper bit her lip, then exhaled through her nose. "I'm sorry," she whispered, he fingers squeezing Claire's. "I was wrong, and we miss you and want you to come spend time with us again. A lot."

Claire's smile softened. "I missed you, too."

The girl's forehead creased, her face serious. "Will you forgive me?"

"Always." Claire put her arms around Harper, feeling her eyes start to burn again. She blinked away the tears before they spilled down her cheeks and pulled back, slightly less disoriented. "Why don't you put on your skates now, okay?" Habitually, she smoothed down the girl's hair. "I'm very happy to see you again."

Afterwards, when Harper hurried off toward a cluster of other kids and Claire had no excuse to avoid Owen, she turned to him.

He stepped toward her, a wooden barrier between them, and cleared his throat. "She told me everything."

Claire winced involuntarily, hands clasped on the railing more for the sake of not sliding down to the ice than anything else. "It wasn't her fault, Owen."

He looked down at his feet, then raised his gaze reluctantly, making her wish she could reach over and smooth out the crease between his brows. "It wasn't her decision to make, either."

"Yes. It was mine." Claire rubbed her forehead and glanced over her shoulder when someone called out her name. "Look, I've got to…"

Owen nodded and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his pants. Took a step back, finding it hard to maintain the eye contact and harder still to look away from her. "Sure." He cleared his throat. "You think we could maybe talk later?"

Claire hesitated, tempted to find an excuse to say no, full of reasons she couldn't explain even to herself to do just that. Watching his stand this close to her stirred the longing that she tried to bury deep inside of herself, the unlived life, hiding behind the walls she'd built, looking for a way out.

Instead, she nodded. "Of course."

She owed him that much. Owed something to herself, too, although this was harder to put into words.

xoox

The spring in Madison was uncertain and temperamental. Like a timid animal, it would hold back and lurk on the outskirts of winter, its weather unpredictable and moody. It would tease them with sunny afternoons only to snap them back into submission with chilly mornings and a coating frost on the car windows, reminding them all who was really and truly in charge.

Right now, however, the evening was warm and calm, the sky streaked with reds and oranges and the wind tugging at the tree branches and chasing dust along the footpaths. A true promise.

Claire didn't know how they ended up here, in this packed café. Wasn't sure the decision was hers, the past 30 minutes of her life feeling smudged, like someone had run an eraser over a picture drawn in pencil, blurring the lines. Being face to face with Owen, talking to him threw her off, and she couldn't stop her hands from shaking. During that hour she had spent with kids, she was very much aware of him sitting on the bleachers, his presence like static in the air – not something she could feel or hear, per se, but not exactly an easy thing to ignore, either.

After gulping down half of her cup of hot chocolate, Harper spotted a friend from school and took off for the kids' corner, leaving her and Owen alone, staring awkwardly into their coffee and avoiding eye contact.

He needed a haircut, she noted absently. Not because it looked bad, but because he hated his hair being much longer than it was right now. She could smell the garage on him, and the memory ricocheted achingly with longing inside of her. It made her wish she could bury her nose into his neck and breathe in that weird combination of his aftershave and Skittles and motor oil that got imprinted in her mind with such clarity it almost hurt.

"So," Claire cleared her throat, breaking the pause that was starting to feel suffocating. "How have you been?"

Owen, who chose that exact moment to take a sip of his coffee, nearly choked on a scalding hot drink. He swallowed it, allowing it to burn his tongue and throat and studied her across the table. Her hair that had been pulled into a braid earlier was now falling down her shoulders, framing her face and trapping the early evening sunlight between the strands. Her mother's jade ring the same colour as her eyes winked at him when she picked up a spoon and stirred her cappuccino. And all the words he had wanted to say to her in the weeks since their separation were suddenly gone, replaced by a think lump in his throat that rendered him speechless, his mind numb.

 _Like someone punched me in the gut and I haven't been able to breathe ever since_ , he thought.

"Good," he uttered after a few moments. Managed to smile even, like this was no big deal. Like having a casual chat about nothing with the woman who he kept reaching for in the night only to find a cold pillow was his regular Friday night. The absurdity of the situation would have been hilarious had it not been so damn painful. "Barry found an old bike at what I assume was a junkyard. He said I could keep it if I manage to get it running."

Claire's eyebrows quirked curiously, the corners of her mouth lifting. "A bike, huh?" she echoed.

Owen chuckled. "A heart wants what a heart wants," he started, but faltered when it hit too close to home. He knew he should have laughed it off, maybe asked her about her job, her family. She probably knew he had gone to one of Zach's games because the boy invited him, and that was as decent a conversation starter as any. Instead, he let out a long breath. "That shirt you used to sleep in still smells like you." His voice dropped and he shook his head. It felt odd to say out loud the words that left him bruised on the inside. "I keep typing the text messages to you and erasing them. Random stuff, but you know what they say about the force of habit."

His lips curved humorlessly as he started to fold and unfold the paper napkin, needing to do something with his hands. Their food was sitting between them, untouched, save for the half-eaten cookie Harper had asked for and forgotten about.

There was an almost tangible uneasiness to her that reflected his own inner turmoil, but instead of being relieved by it, by not being alone in this weird limbo, Owen couldn't help but wish that there was an easier way to talk about this giant elephant in the room that no one even bothered to tell him about. Last night, when Harper spilled everything to him while the storm raged outside, as if trying to cleanse the world, wash away everything old and start anew, he was filled with near-exhilaration, the explanation so simple that it had left him feeling elated.

In that moment, though, he wasn't so sure, all hope drained out of him.

"I had to learn how to French braid Harper's hair," he added softly. Paused, allowing his words to sink in. "Why didn't you tell me?"

Claire looked away from him and out the window, her eyebrows furrowed and her bottom lit caught between her teeth. "Look, Harper went through a very traumatic experience. I don't think either one of us had any right to force any changes on her for our own selfish reasons." She shook her head. "I knew I couldn't."

Owen nodded slowly and reached for her hand, but she clasped her palms around her cup and he pretended that he was going for a packet of sugar instead, even though his drink was already sweet enough to rot his teeth in ten minutes flat. A little more, and it'd turn into a syrup. "But it's okay now, right?" He sounded scared, bordering on desperate, and he hated it. Hated the edge in his voice that spoke of panic. "I mean, we can work it out, can't we?"

Claire dropped her gaze, then glanced up again and met his eyes.

"It's probably not a good idea," she admitted at last. "You and I."

"Claire…"

"I know I did what your daughter had asked me to because, at the time, she deserved not having her life turned upside down again. Which, I admit, wasn't fair to you, but I still think none of us is ready for this." Her voice cracked a little and she paused to take a steadying breath. "I don't think I am, and you're probably not, either."

"You're not doing anyone any favours by pushing away something that could be-" he faltered, searching for words that wouldn't come.

"I don't know how to do it, Owen," she whispered. "I don't know how to fix any of this for you. I can't even fix my own life."

"We don't need you to fix anything," he croaked. "There's nothing to fix." He took a shaky breath and leaned back in his chair, the spell broken, the closeness no longer meaning anything. He rubbed his eyes. "Look, I'm not going to force you into anything you don't want to be a part of. But this—this is not about Harper anymore. It's about you and me." There was an uncompromising note to his voice, one that always appeared when he knew he was right. Except now, instead of triumphant, he sounded defeated and lost.

"I know." Her fingers were absently running over the handle of her cup. "But maybe it's better that way." She sighed. "Maybe we're better off… like this."

 _Is this it?_ He wanted to ask. _Is this over between us? Is this the end?_ But the words glued his mouth shut, his jaw locked into place, his tongue refusing to cooperate. All the arguments washed out of his mind, replaced by the bitter aftertaste of defeat.

She swallowed, her gaze flickered toward Harper who was giggling over something with a girl who Claire recognized as someone from her class. "I'm glad you came back," she added softly.

There were words rolling on that tip of his tongue, words he desperately wanted to spit out for fear of never having a chance to do so again. Words that seemed too big to be kept inside of him for much longer. There were things that he was still figuring out for himself, trying to find that balance between all the changes that were happening in his life, his fear of moving forward and the even greater fear of being stuck where he had been for the past few years.

Losing someone almost killed him, his very existence felt pointless and empty for so long he had started to think he would never get out of that black void that kept sucking him deeper with every breath, with every flicker of memories. He would've been terrified, if only he cared. Yet, it made sense to a certain degree, if only because there was natural progressing to death that he couldn't fight against no matter how hard he tried. But with Claire… Losing her when she was within arm's reach, looking at her and knowing that he couldn't have her – somehow, the very idea of it was twice more excruciating. Not now. Not when he was—

Harper swept in on them then before he so much as opened his mouth, chatting a mile a minute and dumping her news on Claire she hadn't had a chance to spill on their way here, all while trying to finish her cookie as well as Claire's fries. There was going to be a concert at her school in two months and she had a role. Owen's mother was teaching her how to plant flowers, and this had been quite a hit lately. Last week, they went to see _How To Train Your Dragon_ in 3D at a movie theatre, and it was 'so much more fun than the DVD'.

Claire listened, asked the follow-up questions, and for a split second, it almost felt right again. The tightness is Owen's chest loosened, his face splitting into a grin as she watched his daughter and Claire chatting away.

Until it was time leave.

Claire brushed off his attempt to take care of the bill, hugged Harper, getting the girl to promise her that she wouldn't disappear again, and then she was gone, leaving a ghost of a memory of the past hour wrapped in a cloud of floral perfume behind. And for a moment, Owen felt so hollow inside he thought he would fold in on himself and disappear altogether. Quite frankly, it hadn't even occurred to him that they wouldn't be table to talk this through, not after Harper had come clean about the whole story, at least, the outcome so obvious in his head that the unexpected turn of events completely knocked the ground from under his feet.

"Did it work?" Harper asked, climbing into her seat.

"Did what work?" Owen echoed absently, strapping her in.

"Claire," she pressed, watching him impatiently. "Is she coming back?"

He closed her door, then slid into the driver's seat. Turned to look at her over his shoulder. "No, pumpkin, I don't think so."

Harper's face fell. She dropped her hands in her lap, her eyebrows knitting together in confusion. "But I said I was sorry. Is she mad at me?"

Owen blinked, caught off-guard. "What? No, of course, she's not. It's not about you." He sighed and explained, "We're good, I promise. We… we're still friends. Things just… sometimes they don't work out, is all."

"Is she mad at _you_?"

"Not that I know of." He smiled, hoping it didn't look at stiff as it felt. Shook his head and reached over to ruffle Harper's hair, which earned him a displeased look and a tight-lipped pout. "It's grown-up stuff."

"That's silly," the girl muttered.

Owen buckled his own seatbelt and turned the key in the ignition, starting the car at last. "Tell me about it."

xoox

"Are you done sulking?" Barry asked, squinting at Owen in the sun from the steps of Owen's front porch, an open but barely touched bottle of beer sitting next to him.

Owen peeked at him from under the belly of the bike that found a permanent residence in his driveway while he fiddled and tinkered with its guts, trying to get it to be cooperative again. It was a piece of work, but one worthy of his time. It was a beauty, too – he owned something similar a very long time ago, and the familiarity of playing with one again was quite soothing. Kept his mind busy as well, which was all Owen craved these days.

Jenny hated his old bike, called Owen reckless and stupid for riding it, threatening more than once to leave him 'before he killed himself', somehow more okay with him going off to the army than with him owning a two-wheel vehicle. The memory had a wistful aftertaste to it, their bickering overselling 'that killing machine' every weekend now amusing rather than irritating.

"I'm not sulking," Owen muttered, peering into the toolbox, looking for the right wrench, determined to bring this thing back to life again.

Something stirred inside him at the idea of owning this bike – a Triumph, maybe a decade old. He wanted to repaint it too, in black or maybe navy blue to cover up the brown rusty patches. He'd been working on it for two weeks, on nights and weekends mostly, unable to shut off his mind and finding solace in focusing on something that wasn't a gaping hole in his life.

Harper loved it, if only because it made her the coolest kid in her grade. He might have been completely useless when it came to school bakes or talent shows, but he could very well pull the cool dad with a motorcycle thing without breaking a sweat. So long as he revived it, of course.

"'Course you're not," Barry huffed. "You're putting overtime at both jobs-"

"Which is called bringing home the bacon," Owen pointed out.

Barry gave him a _Don't give me that shit_ look and shook his head, chuckling under his breath.

It was refreshing, in a way, to have someone call him out on his crap. Artfully dodging his mother's questions and diverting Harper's attention was starting to get rather exhausting, all things considered.

He brushed beads of perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand and squinted in the sunlight. Working on the bike at night was undeniably a far less healthy, but at least it wasn't making him melt all over the place, feeling like he was made of candle wax.

It was getting hotter with every day, the days growing longer in that way that would make summer feel like it had snuck up on them unawares. Harper's school would be over in just a few weeks, her mind already brimming with ideas for the summer break. She had asked Owen if she could go to a camp because a few kids from her class were going, and the request echoed achingly inside him, leaving him torn between saying yes to adventures, the fear of separation, and outright bewilderment – how did she get so old without him noticing?

He didn't say anything just yet, still toying with the thought in his mind, part of him hoping she would forget about it, switch to something else, overcome with the fierce protectiveness and scared of waking up tomorrow to her high school graduation.

"Daddy!" The door swung open and Harper burst out onto the porch, her heavy curls tied into a ponytail bouncing as she hopped down the steps. She thrust a house phone in his direction. "Grandma wants to talk to you."

xoox

There was a certain degree of comfort in having the things go back to normal, whatever qualified as _normal_ these days.

The one thing that Claire didn't consciously notice until Harper had come back was how she would involuntarily search for her and Owen whenever the door would open before the class, telling herself each time that it didn't matter, swallowing her disappointment and nearly choking on it. Now that this was out of the way, she could just as easily go back to accepting his occasional presence without the pressure of having to make anything out of it.

Granted, Owen didn't try to talk to her again past the usual hellos and an occasional question or two about his daughter and her progress. They were right back where they had started all those months ago, plus an awkward attempt to avoid eye contact with one another at all costs and never being asked to watch Harper again.

She could deal with that.

When a few classes later the girl asked Claire about going to the stables again, she had gladly arranged it, although she didn't join them this time, pleading the overflow at work due to rapidly approaching summer, which often resulted in a heightened number of moves and renovations. Her excuse even wasn't a complete lie, save for the fact that it was Sunday and she actually spent it eating ice-cream on Karen's couch, but who was there to judge?

"You're pathetic," Karen stated, taking the spoon from her sister and scooping half of the tub of mint chocolate chip ice-cream, ignoring Claire's protests.

"You do understand that you're sitting right here with me, don't you?" Claire pointed out flatly.

"Hey, I never said I wasn't pathetic."

Hence was Claire's surprise when she saw Owen hover near the gate to the rink one night a couple of weeks later when she was about to wrap up for the day, her muscles tight and her body pleasantly spent, and even the slight discomfort in her ankle after a fall a few days ago not bothering her as much.

It was getting late and the building was empty, the VA offices had been closed for hours, hers probably the only lights that were still on.

Claire's stomach squeezed in a familiar way, consumed with longing at the sight of him, hovering where he would have in the past when their lives weren't this damn complicated yet. As Paul McCartney's _The Never Happened Before_ continued to fill the space around them, she made a wide finishing circle around the center of the arena, ending it with a spin that turned the lights around her into a colorful kaleidoscope of twirling flares before she slid over to him, still unsure of what it could be that brought him here.

"Why, if this isn't-" she began, trying to keep her voice light and casual.

However, the prepared quip died on her lips at the sight of his ashen face and frantic, haunted eyes that watched her approach him, his grip on the gate so tight that he knuckles had gone white.

"What happened?" Claire asked, realizing the moment the words fell out of her mouth that she didn't want to know the answer. Not when he was looking the way he did. But it was too late.

"They want to take her away from me," Owen said, his voice hollow. "They're gonna take Harper away."

"Who?"

"Jenny's parents want to file for sole custody," he muttered.

Claire wasn't sure which one of them moved, but one moment there were three feet of space between them, and the next his arms locked around her, holding on to her as though his world would fall apart if he'd let go. His body was shaking ever so slightly, small shivers running down it in waves, his breath short and laboured like he'd run all the way here. She could feel his heart thudding so fast she feared it would fracture his ribs.

"I'm sorry," Owen muttered on a shaky, shuddered inhale. "I didn't know where else to go."

Claire's arms closed around him, a soothing hand on the back of his neck. "It's going to be okay," she whispered, pressing her forehead to his temple, his pulse hammering fast against her skin. "I swear, it's going to be okay."

 **To be continued...**

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 **A/N:** **Thank you for reading, feedback is always much appreciated :)**


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